In 1987, when Jessica was nineteen and already had three children, she returned home to her mother’s fifth-floor tenement apartment, on Tremont Avenue. She had been staying with her boyfriend, and when they broke up she had nowhere else to go. Living with her mother, Lourdes, wasn’t easy. (Some names have been changed.) Lourdes, who was thirty-six, hadn’t had a job in years. Money was tight, visitors were frequent, emotions ran high. Jessica no longer had a room of her own; she now slept on a velveteen couch in the sala, or living room.
Like her mother, Jessica slept late—through the sounds of working people picking their way around the previous night’s detritus, the sibilant noise of old wooden brooms slapping against cement, the tinkle of smashed glass as it dropped into the gutter, the whoosh of water buckets clearing away vomit and cigarette butts and pork-rind bags. Jessica’s three-year-old daughter, Serena, shared a room with Lourdes. Jessica’s twin girls had a crib next to the couch. Even though Jessica was living with her kids, she wasn’t really looking after them: she might bathe them, or style their hair, but Lourdes had more or less been raising Serena, and Jessica’s friend Rosa, who loved children, often took care of the twins. Jessica’s first loyalty was to the street.
Jessica and her mother argued constantly about Jessica’s irresponsibility, but Lourdes’s pronouncements carried little weight: she, too, loved to party and, in recent years, had sometimes been a reluctant mother to her own kids. Jessica had always wanted to be taken care of; Lourdes, who had had to raise her own siblings, wanted to be taken care of, too.
Tremont marks the north end of the South Bronx; Lourdes’s apartment was just off the Grand Concourse. The neighborhood drug trade was booming, and although cellular phones hadn’t hit the street level of the business yet, there were plenty of beepers—on boys riding skateboards, on boys buying Pampers for their babies or heading for the stores on Fordham Road and Burnside to steal. But the boys who caught Jessica’s eye were the ones walking out of the bodega with cash and attitude. They pushed open the smudged doors plastered with Budweiser posters as if they were stepping into a party instead of onto a littered sidewalk beside a potholed street. It was similar to the way Jessica stepped onto the pavement whenever she left the three girls with her mother and descended the four flights of stairs, to emerge, expectant, from the paint-chipped vestibule. Outside, anything could happen.
The block was hectic, but her appearance usually caused a stir. Jessica created an aura of intimacy wherever she went. You could be talking to her in the middle of Tremont and feel as if a confidence were being exchanged beneath a tent of sheets. Guys in cars offered rides. Grown men got stupid. Women got worried or jealous. Boys made promises they didn’t keep.
Although Jessica wanted to be somebody’s girlfriend, she was usually the other girl, the mistress; boys called up to her window after they’d dropped off their main girls. Her oldest daughter, Serena, whom she had had when she was sixteen, belonged to a boy named Kuri. Jessica had met Kuri at a toga party on Crotona Avenue, when she should have been in school. He was a break dancer, a member of the Rock Steady Crew. One thing led to another, and they ended up in a bedroom on a pile of coats.
Kuri, who had a steady girlfriend, refused to admit that Serena was his child. When Lourdes asked Jessica who the father was, she lied and told her it was a neighborhood boy she’d dated. Then one day she came home with a video of the movie “Beat Street,” in which Kuri had a small part. Lourdes had heard enough about Kuri to be on the alert as they settled down with their dog, Sparky, to watch the film. In it, a boy who looked a lot like Serena did a break dance and challenged a rival crew to a battle at the Roxy.
“Hold that pause,” Lourdes shouted. “That’s Serena’s father! I will cut my pussy off and give it to that dog if that ain’t Serena’s father.”
After Serena’s birth, Jessica dropped out of school. She became increasingly depressed, and even attempted suicide by swallowing pills. When she was in the hospital getting her stomach pumped, she learned that she was pregnant with twins, by Kuri’s brother. He acknowledged the children, but he cheated on her, and now she was home again.
At Lourdes’s, the life of the apartment moved in lockstep with the life of the street. The beginning of the month, when the welfare check came in, was a good time—a time to buy things, a time to go out dancing. Lourdes packed the shelves with food. She sent Jessica to the dollar store to get King Pine and cocoa butter and shampoo. Outside, the drug dealers enjoyed the surge in business. By late afternoon, Lourdes was up—blasting Spanish music, clanking around the kitchen, cooking rice and gandules and pork chops. Evelyn, her younger daughter, was coming home from working at C-Town; Phil, her older son, was back from his classes at Hunter College, holed up in his room. Jessica’s baby brother, Joey, rolled in and out with his posse. Boyfriends and neighbors were dropping by. Lourdes was an excellent cook: she fed them all.
Everything changed at the end of the month, when the money ran out. Lourdes would take to her bed. Meals were sometimes reduced to white rice and ketchup. Jessica gave the girls sugar water before bed to fill them up. Joey stole fruit from a nearby Korean market and bread from a grocery store across the street. Jessica might try to cajole the girls’ fathers to provide Pampers, but they didn’t always come through.
Phil and Evelyn were trying to stay out of trouble, but Joey and Jessica were playing the odds. Joey was drifting into crime; Jessica still counted on being rescued. “Jessica was a dreamer,” Lourdes recalled recently. “She always wanted to have a king with a maid. I always told her, ‘That’s only in books. Face reality.’ Her dream was more upper than herself.” Lourdes would caution her beautiful daughter as she disappeared down the dreary stairwell: “God ain’t gonna have a pillow waiting for your ass when you fall landing from the sky.”
Jessica did take a fall. The decade that followed brought high times and hard times, and the hard times usually came from Jessica’s thralldom to her chosen saviors. Her life would change utterly, and then change again. In some ways, though, Jessica was lucky. Not everyone survives being rescued.
BLIND DATE
On January 23, 1988, Jessica met George—Boy George, he was called—on a blind date arranged by Evelyn’s boyfriend. It would be a double date, and she agreed to it on one condition: “If he’s ugly, bring me home at ten.”
The night of the date, Lourdes and her daughters waited by the window, looking down onto Tremont. “George pulled up in a car that was like the ocean,” Lourdes says. It was a graphite Mercedes-Benz, and he saluted Lourdes through the sunroof. As soon as Jessica saw him, she adjusted her curfew. He was so handsome in his leather trenchcoat—with dark hair, a goatee, smooth skin, dark-brown eyes—that she was willing to surrender the next day or two. Suddenly, Lourdes “remembered” that she couldn’t babysit.
Boy George understood the cue: he recalls giving Lourdes some high-quality cocaine and a thousand dollars in cash. Lourdes was not the first difficult mother he’d encountered, nor was it the first time he’d heard a response like hers: Baby, you can keep my daughter out all night. Jessica admired his savvy, although the implications of the transaction embarrassed her.
“She’d just sold her to me for a thousand dollars,” Boy George says. “I could have been a serial killer and sliced her up.” Actually, a thousand dollars was nothing to Boy George. At the time he and Jessica met, he was running the largest heroin operation in the borough, bringing in a quarter of a million dollars a week.
The young couples went to the movies and dinner, and then Boy George suggested they go to a club. Jessica had dressed conservatively, and she asked to stop by Lourdes’s apartment so she could change. Contact lenses replaced her eyeglasses. Her hair, which had been stretched into a tight bun, now fell around her neck in a soft, loose mane. The long skirt, blazer, and plain pumps were exchanged for spandex tights and knee-high boots. Then, there was the makeup. Jessica called this “dressing puta.” When she returned to the car, Boy George asked, “You sure you the same girl?”
He and Jessica ended the night in a five-hundred-dollar suite at the Loews Glenpoint Hotel, in Teaneck, New Jersey. Boy George asked her about her dreams and fears and actually listened to her answers. She told him what she had never told Lourdes: that one of her mother’s boyfriends had sexually abused her for years. Boy George held her all night. Jessica was overwhelmed: despite all he’d paid for, he didn’t expect her to have sex with him. He ordered room service and fed Jessica strawberries in the king-size bed. “I felt like a princess,” she says. “I felt loved.” As it turned out, not having sex with a girl on a first date was one of Boy George’s most successful strategies.
The following morning, Jessica encountered her first brunch—sliced fruit fanned out on silver trays, cold cuts rolled into cylinders, bread baked in animal shapes. All this was arranged on a large cloth-covered table beneath an ice sculpture of two swans in a melting embrace.
THE FIFTY-DOLLAR RULE
Not long after their first date, Jessica paged Boy George from a pay phone on the Grand Concourse. Snow was falling. Jessica didn’t have a winter coat. Her penny loafers were soaked.
Boy George was at Grand Billiards, playing pool. He didn’t want to interrupt his game, so he dispatched one of his workers. “I’m calling for Boy George,” the worker said.
“Oh, hello.” Jessica remembers that she used her softest voice, just loud enough to be heard above the traffic. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.” Jessica opened many conversations exactly like this. She was beginning a request for money, which would be followed by an explanation that would continue as long as necessary, like falling dominoes. She needed a ride. She didn’t have money for a cab. She needed a ride to a friend’s house to collect twenty dollars. The girl owed her the money. She needed the money to buy milk for her hungry daughters.
“Hold on a minute,” the worker said. Boy George took the receiver.
His voice was calm but sharp. “Listen, if you are calling me just for money, don’t call. Don’t you call me for money.”
“Mmnnn,” Jessica said.
“Where you at?” Boy George asked.
“A Hundred and Seventy-sixth and the Concourse.”
“Stay there. Someone will be by to pick you up.”
The worker drove her to Grand Billiards. They waited in the car. Boy George joined them with three friends. Jessica asked him for money a second time.
“I only like to say things once. If you calling me for money, don’t call.”
“Fuck you,” Jessica snapped.
In retrospect, Boy George thinks he should have “served her” with a proper beating. Instead, he ordered the driver to go to Lourdes’s building, dragged Jessica out of the car, and frog-marched her up the stairs. At some point, he noticed that she was wearing a pair of jeans he had seen on Lourdes.
“Whose jeans is those?” he asked.
“They mine.”
“Why your mother have them on then?
“It’s not like what’s mine is mine. We the same size. We—”
“Shit,” he said. He inspected the cabinets and the refrigerator. “There was nothing,” he recalls. “There was nothing in that subway station.”
Within a few hours, his employees returned to the apartment laden with grocery bags. Joey rushed to his window and looked down over Tremont. Two Jeeps were parked outside, still stuffed with groceries.
“There was so much food that the bags didn’t fit in the kitchen,” Joey says. “There was food in my room under the bed.” Meat—chicken, pork chops, steak—filled the refrigerator and the freezer. Lourdes sobbed as each grocery bag was carried beneath the lucky horseshoe stuck above her door.
“He got everything,” Jessica says. “Everything.” She was sure, because she and Lourdes tried to figure out items he had forgotten or overlooked. He had even bought a flea collar and dog food for Sparky.
The next day, Boy George brought Jessica bags of clothes. From now on, Jessica had to represent. He and Jessica sat on the couch in the crowded living room. He asked Jessica where she slept.
“You sitting on my bed right now.”
It wasn’t a fold-out bed. It was a couch. Boy George recalls saying to himself, “What the fuck is going on here?”
Boy George gave Jessica a job packing heroin at one of his mills, near Aqueduct Avenue, though she worked there only briefly, because the smell of the heroin made her ill. He also gave her money for her daughters, but he didn’t much want them around. Once, Jessica left Lourdes’s apartment to run an errand and didn’t come home for a week. “I just dropped my kids for him,” Jessica says. “At night, he would say, ‘Don’t leave and go back to them.’ I just did what my mother did to me.” Soon, Jessica moved out completely.
Boy George had a number of apartments—one on Henwood, one on Morris, two in a Manhattan building called Normandie Court—and he would move Jessica from one to another. “He’d bring home a whole lot of videos, and I would just watch TV. I didn’t have to get a job. I was to cook and clean and take care of the things, and I would get my allowance at the end of the week.”
In the early days, Jessica’s allowance was generous—a thousand dollars a week or more. George also surprised her with vacations and jewelry. He didn’t want her gold to be thin and bendable. It had to be thick. If Jessica liked a necklace—a heart of sapphires, say—he would tell his jeweller, “We’ll take that, but make it different.” He got her a diamond Rolex and added her birthstone to it. He gave her a belt buckle with her name spelled out in emeralds. To George, looking good meant looking unique. He wanted Jessica customized, like his cars.
“He matched me up,” Jessica says. No stained clothes, nothing borrowed, no jeans with a yellow sheen from the cheap soap at the laundromat. He took Jessica shopping in Greenwich Village and introduced her to the fifty-dollar rule. Nothing under fifty dollars was to be taken off the rack. No ten-dollar stores, no V.I.M., no Payless.
Jessica enjoyed going shopping. She added to a growing collection of leather coats—full-length and waist-length, in rainbow colors. She gave some of Boy George’s sweatsuits to Joey, supplied Pampers for the children, and bought sneakers for everyone. She gave Lourdes cash and paid her rent and her electric bills.
At first, Boy George discouraged Jessica from spending time at Lourdes’s, and soon he forbade it. He considered Jessica’s mother a bad influence. Occasionally, he allowed the twins, who were living with Rosa by then, to be brought over to whatever apartment he and Jessica were living in. Serena remained with Lourdes. Weeks might pass without a visit from Jessica. Lourdes says, “I didn’t even know where my daughter lived.”
SNOW IN THE POCONOS
Soon after Jessica met George, her brother Joey got together with a girl named Marisol. Marisol was a sportier, sweeter version of the girl Jessica had been. Joey and Marisol met outside a bodega when Joey was hanging out at the western end of Tremont, robbing people. That day, she had her hair pulled up severely, with two lollipops stuck in the topknot of her bun. At four feet nine, Marisol was chunky and proud of it. She preferred tight pants, and shirts that exposed her midriff. The spandex pants that were in style were called bubble gums. Marisol had a pair in every color—blue, red, green, yellow, black, pink, and turquoise. “I used to rock those, they used to cling to my butt, I used to love it,” Marisol says. That day, she was wearing the turquoise pair. She swished into the store and out again. Joey stood before her in a red leather hooded jacket, the hood trimmed with what looked like rabbit fur. He was holding a pack of Mike & Ike candy in his hand. He grinned. “We began to conversate,” Marisol recalls. Soon Joey brought her home to meet his family.
Jessica was the most beautiful girl Marisol had ever seen: light-skinned, with “dead” hair—straight and shiny, like a white girl’s. She had sleepy eyes, a big butt, large breasts, manicured nails, and a wide smile crowded with white, even teeth. She smelled like a rich girl—not of the sharp scents you got at the dollar store but of a name-brand perfume. And she was friendly, which surprised Marisol, because a girl with all that could have been a snob.
In early 1989, Boy George told Jessica that they were going to the Poconos, and he invited Joey and Marisol to come along. They all drove off in a white stretch limousine. Marisol remembers wishing the chauffeur would loop around her block so she could show the car off to her friends. After the limousine crossed the George Washington Bridge, Boy George opened the cooler and pulled out a bottle of Moët. He was in an expansive mood and wanted everyone to drink. He himself would not drink, because he was training as an amateur boxer. Marisol didn’t want to drink, either, because alcohol made her queasy, and Jessica wasn’t feeling in a partying mood just yet. “Whoever doesn’t drink has to walk—I’m leaving you on the side of the road,” Boy George told them. Marisol remembers that she began to smile, thinking it was a joke. “He means it,” Jessica whispered. “Listen to him, ’cause he’ll leave you, and he will—he did it to me.” Marisol and Joey drank. Jessica had to drink until the champagne ran out. Then she got sick, and Boy George told the chauffeur to pull into the breakdown lane. With her head jutting out the window, Jessica vomited, clasping her hair and her gold chains at the nape of her neck.
A few hours later, the Mount Airy Lodge appeared, like a palace tucked in the snow. Boy George paid for their rooms in cash, and handed Joey a set of keys. The rooms George rented were called Crystal Palace Suites, and each one was big enough for an entire family. Everything was color-coördinated in gold and powder-blue. There was a TV, a stereo, a fireplace with a log that never stopped burning. There was a red heart-shaped Jacuzzi in the huge bathroom. The bed was round, and there were mirrors on the walls and on the ceiling. The living room opened onto a heated swimming pool. The room was so interesting, Marisol thought, you would never need the street. When Boy George and Joey headed off to ski, Jessica was grateful for Marisol’s company. George could sometimes stay away for days, and she hated being left alone.
Around midnight, she and Marisol were still sitting beside the swimming pool. Suddenly, the lights went out, leaving the girls in darkness, except for the underwater spotlights of the pool. A croaky voice broke the silence. It was George pretending to be Jason, from the movie “Friday the 13th.” “We were so scared,” Jessica says. “That was when there were things that could scare me.” Boy George tossed Jessica in the water, fully clothed.
Back in their own Crystal Palace Suite, Marisol and Joey pretended they were on their honeymoon. They made love on the round bed and ordered food and watched TV and made love again in the heart-shaped Jacuzzi. From their bed, they watched the sunrise. “We broke night,” Marisol says. Over the next six years, Marisol and Joey had two children, but this was their only honeymoon. They were both fourteen.
DO NOT PASS GO
Boy George didn’t keep his other girlfriends a secret, and he expected Jessica to take his telephone messages. “I’d get hit if I got mad when the other girls called,” she said. Sometimes Jessica took the liberty of calling the girls back. “Don’t beep my man,” she’d say, or, “Don’t you be calling my husband.” When Boy George came home, he would berate her. “What are you doing beeping my girls back? You’re not allowed to beep my girls back.”
Jessica could tell when he was going on a date, because he wore slacks instead of jeans. “Why don’t you just wear your jeans if you going out with the boys?” she would ask.
“Why don’t you fucking shut the fuck up?” he’d reply.
More and more, Jessica saw George late at night if she saw him at all. Sometimes, he locked her in the apartment. He no longer gave her a regular allowance, and he was gone for weeks at a time. During the spring of 1989, she borrowed money from her girlfriends; she didn’t dare touch the stacks of cash he left lying around the apartment. Materially, in fact, her life was no longer very different from her life with Lourdes, except that the apartment was “hooked up,” and she had a telephone. (She didn’t know it at the time, but federal investigators had installed a wiretap.)
By then, Boy George was beating Jessica more frequently. She knew she’d received a particularly bad one if she came to at his mother’s. (Once, he left her there after hitting her with a two-by-four.) Some beatings, such as the one that cracked her skull, were handled by a private physician.
On the morning of May 1, 1989, Boy George got a call from a lieutenant of his, who told him to “do a Jimmy James Brown”—make a run for it. When Boy George stepped outside, he was arrested by agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency and local police officers, who had been following his organization for almost two years. Twenty-two of his employees had already been brought in.
It was fourteen months before Boy George’s case went to trial, and for most of that time he was housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in lower Manhattan, better known as the M.C.C. At first, Jessica went to see him almost every day. Eventually, she managed to bypass the usual procedure—which involved guards and forms and stamps and metal detectors—by using a paralegal’s pass that one of Boy George’s private investigators procured for her. Ostensibly, Jessica was conducting research for Boy George’s case. In fact, she ran errands for him all over the city, buying him sneakers and sweatsuits, checking on his mother, bringing him homemade food, yachting magazines, and pornography. They shadowboxed for hours in the attorneys’ room. Finally, he had time for her.
Jessica relished the attention she was now getting. One day, Boy George even gave Jessica his favorite charm for safekeeping—two tiny gold boxing gloves, which symbolized the Golden Gloves competition he still hoped to win. She wore the gloves on a slender gold chain around her neck “Because I’m his champ,” she said proudly. At the same time, Jessica never underestimated his reach. Boy George had a hit man. He was fond of saying, “If I can trust you, I can kill you.”
To prove her devotion, Jessica agreed to get a tattoo. “If you love me, you’ll do it,” Boy George told her. He decided on the words “Jessica loves George,” over her heart; she had it done in a tattoo parlor on Avenue C. For the next one, though, George wanted something fancier. He read through the trade magazines until he discovered a tattoo artist in Elizabeth, New Jersey, who had been rated one of the nation’s best; George’s driver took Jessica there.
The second tattoo, high on her right thigh, was elegant: a heart with a rose and “George” written beneath it, in script. The day after she got it, Jessica wore a skirt with a slit, so she could show him. When he saw the tattoo, he pronounced with appreciative incredulity, “You stupid bitch!”
Altogether, she got six tattoos in his honor, including a poem, written on a scroll, just above her left shoulder blade:
As Boy George prepared for his trial, Jessica settled into her new freedom. She moved back in with Lourdes and Serena, but there were some weeks when she went out dancing every night. Serena often tried to block the door to keep her mother home. “I used to always break her stockings, so that she would have to come back in,” Serena recalls. “But she never came back in—she would fight me to get to that door.”
“The twins had each other; Serena had nobody,” Jessica’s older brother, Phil, recalls. “Serena suffered a whole lot more than Jessica did.” Evelyn had taught her niece to open and heat a can of Spaghettios when she was hungry, and never to open the apartment door when she was alone. Serena watched cartoons all morning and afternoon while everyone slept. She would try to shush her baby sisters when they made noise. She was five. People often said of her, “That child is too grown!”
Joey was serving time in a juvenile facility for attempted murder, but Marisol still came by the house regularly. She and Serena kept each other company. She styled Serena’s hair. They poured baby powder on the floor in the dining room and pretended to be ice skating.
To celebrate the birthday of a friend of Jessica’s, Boy George told her to take a thousand dollars from his stash. He booked a limousine to deliver her and her girlfriends to Victor’s Café, on Fifty-second Street, in Manhattan, where they ate a seemingly endless meal. He even called the restaurant on the pay phone to send his love. The platano had candles. Handsome waiters sang.
In August of 1990, Boy George and five co-defendants went on trial. In November, George was convicted of conspiring to run a continuing criminal enterprise and of tax evasion, and the following April was given a life sentence with no option for parole. The judge told him that he was the most violent person ever to have set foot in her courtroom.
After the sentencing, Boy George phoned Jessica: “He told me, ‘They have your name down on papers already, they gonna arrest you,’ and he wrote to my mother to say that I was going to suffer like a dog.”
Two weeks later, Jessica heard the cop-call. The cop-call was a neighborly warning sounded by anyone who spotted the police, for anyone who might like to know. Jessica walked to the kitchen window to see what was happening. The street had been blocked off. Cruisers were parked and others were pulling up. Then someone pounded on the door, and she heard, “Police! Open up! Policía!”
Jessica called Marisol, who ran all the way from her mother’s. Jessica was handcuffed and brought down to the M.C.C. The timing of the arrest warrant, she later learned, arose from the need to protect her: the D.E.A. had intercepted information that Boy George, presumably fearing she would turn state’s evidence, had put out a contract on her life. But investigators also had information about her brief employment packing heroin. In December, she pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute heroin and was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary.
SOMEWHERE FAR AWAY
By 1994, Jessica’s friend Rosa had added Serena to her growing brood of other people’s children; at Lourdes’s, the child had missed most of first grade. Jessica had been concerned: “The hanging out, the people coming in and out, my daughter didn’t have no privacy.” From prison, she had warned her mother, “The friends you’re hanging out with are going to lead you to me. Believe me, there is a bunk waiting for you.”
Rosa was stocky and strong; she always had a toddler in the crook of her arm. Young mothers would go to their jobs, or out dancing, or they’d need time to work out problems with their men, and they’d leave their kids with her. A strict and practical woman, she could always be trusted. But Jessica’s children were a priority. “They were happy, they weren’t going from house to house,” Rosa recalls. “They used to go to school every single day.” She worried most about Serena, who, in turn, constantly fretted over her younger sisters. “I told her, ‘Serena, I’m the one who is supposed to take care of you. You do what I tell you to do, and I’ll take care of the girls.’ ”
But it was hard to take care of the girls in the Bronx, and it would only get harder as they got older. Serena didn’t sleep well, because of all the street noise and the gunfire, and she would cry out for Lourdes in the middle of the night. Junkies shot up in the stairwells and had sex on the roof. The only play area for the children was a concrete space between two buildings. Rosa’s older brother had recently joined a growing number of Bronx friends and neighbors who had moved upstate, and the news that drifted back to Rosa was all good. Apartments were spacious. Children could play outdoors safely. There were factory jobs. The schools were strict about classwork and attendance. Rosa’s family would help her take care of the children, so that she could go back to work.
In the spring of that year, when Serena was eight, Rosa moved upstate with Jessica’s girls to a housing project in Troy. The same month, Jessica was transferred, at her own request, to a medium-security women’s facility in Danbury, Connecticut, and she would spend most of her sentence there. She wanted to be closer to her children.
The prison was situated on a hilltop that was also home to a flock of geese. It looked like a high school with barbed wire around it. Inside, spotless floors shone against beige cinder-block walls. The women in Jessica’s unit lived in gray cubicles, or “cubes.” Each cube had bunk beds and two squat lockers, one on top of the other. The bathrooms were down the hall.
That summer, Jessica took a particular interest in a correction officer named Ernesto Díaz. Díaz supervised the compound’s power plant, where Jessica had been trained as a lagger—someone who wraps pipes with insulation. She worked the night shift. Most of the time, there wasn’t much work to do, especially since Díaz didn’t believe in what he called “bright work,” or busy work—mopping floors that were already clean, polishing already shining brass railings, painting over paint.
When he could, Díaz says, he left the women alone. “Don’t make my shift rough, and I’ll treat you like a human being” was his philosophy. The inmates often sat and talked, or wrote letters, or listened to the radio, or napped. Díaz occasionally shared treasures of free-world food, like Kentucky Fried Chicken, cranberry juice, or doughnuts. Mr. Doughnut became his nickname.
Díaz was accustomed to the flirting; it was a chronic condition of an officer’s life at a women’s prison. At the plant, he says, women would dance around his desk, sometimes touching themselves and making suggestive remarks. Jessica danced everywhere—in the supply room, in the office. “There were other ones that did it,” Díaz recalls, “but she was very good at it.” Soon they found themselves having long conversations. He told her about his wife and children. Jessica told him about her daughters, especially Serena, and about her own unhappy childhood and her turbulent relationship with Lourdes. He gave her an article about child abuse. Several inmates noticed the increasing amount of time Jessica and Díaz spent alone.
At first, Jessica considered Díaz merely a challenge, but as time went on she found herself moved by his concern for her. She appealed to Queenie, an inmate who practiced Santeria, and one night they performed a ritual to help matters along. Queenie instructed Jessica to obtain an apple. They removed the core, wrote Díaz’s name on a piece of paper, rolled it up and stuck it inside the apple, and then topped it off with honey. It was tucked away in Díaz’s locker.
Jessica and Díaz grew closer. He prepared linguine with clam sauce for her, let her listen to his house-music tapes, brought her a bottle of her favorite perfume. She showed him gifts she had been preparing for her daughters for Family Day, in August.
Family Day was one of the facility’s biggest events: there were hamburgers and hot dogs and Sno-cones for the children; there were performances and games. Jessica hadn’t seen Serena in more than a year; she hadn’t seen the twins since her arrest. “It was all she talked about for several weeks,” Díaz says. Jessica had sent Lourdes all the requisite forms well beforehand. She had even included a free voucher for the forty-five-minute bus ride, and the bus left directly from the Bronx. But when Family Day finally arrived no one showed up.
Jessica was devastated. Díaz brought her a rose and a sympathy card. He offered to mail the gifts to the children, and even included a “Jurassic Park” videotape for the twins and a bottle of perfume for Serena. “That was when she really started to get interested in me,” he says. Díaz also volunteered to visit Jessica’s children in Troy, which meant a great deal to her. He and Jessica fantasized about a future together. Before long, they arranged to have sex in the back of a storage room, but the circumstances made physical intimacy difficult; mostly, they talked through the night. Díaz was struck by Jessica’s longing for contact with her mother.
In the fall, Jessica discovered she was once again pregnant with twins. She told the prison authorities that she’d been raped, by a guard she couldn’t identify, but the internal investigation led to Díaz—plenty of snitches volunteered their suspicions about Jessica and Mr. Doughnut. In the meantime, Jessica was transferred to “the camp,” a minimum-security facility up the road.
Minimum-security status meant fewer restrictions than before, but Jessica had little interest in her new freedoms. One of her roommates remembers that she rarely left her bed. Her pregnancy had gained her a certain amount of institutional notoriety, however, and her friends tried to cheer her up. They made a special jailhouse dish, which involved mashing together everything sweet you could lay your hands on and spreading it over a layer of crushed cookies. They made hooch by mixing fruit with bread from the cafeteria and stowing it above a ceiling panel until it fermented. They painted Jessica’s toenails.
The authorities wanted to run a DNA test on the fetuses, but Jessica refused, in order to protect Díaz. She was still corresponding with him through the mother of a prison friend. She read and reread his letters before she had to toss them down the toilet. She prayed for an early release and daydreamed about what she’d do when she got out. She wrote Serena that she wouldn’t be returning to the Bronx: instead, they’d all go somewhere happy somewhere far away. Rosa chastised Jessica for filling the head of a nine-year-old with such notions. She knew where Jessica’s dreams had led, and she was determined to keep Serena’s head out of the clouds.
THE CHILDREN’S ROOM
Several months later, in the spring of 1995, Evelyn and Marisol brought Serena and the twins for a visit. The visiting room was light and airy. At one end was a play area, which greeted guests with a detailed list of rules. A large sign said, “Welcome Back!” Since some children believed that they were visiting their mothers at work or in the hospital, visitors were not supposed to use the words “prison” and “jail” to describe the place.
Jessica appeared carrying a clear plastic bag full of crocheting. She wore a teal cotton sweatsuit over an ironed white T-shirt. She had colored her hair red with jailhouse dye, but it had grown out, revealing brown-black roots. She wore almost no makeup, and her face looked full and vulnerable. Serena and the twins ran to her and hugged her. Then the twins drifted toward the play area. Serena hovered near Jessica, who tried to defuse the awkwardness by showing her what she’d made: sweaters for the unborn twins and a peach-and-yellow coverlet for Serena.
Jessica then showed her daughter a copy of her most recent sonogram. “See, Baby A, that’s his head, his eyes, the ears.” Jessica outlined the bodies with her fingernail. “There’s Baby B. His eyes there, his ears? You can’t really see him on that one, but there’s his head. They real big, right? That’s what the doctor said, they got big heads.”
With fluid movements, Jessica untied Serena’s ponytail and combed out the knots with her fingers, then made a perfect topknot on the crown of her daughter’s head. Rosa had little time to fuss over the girls’ appearance, but Jessica had always enjoyed making her daughters pretty. Serena loved to be touched. She bit her lip and leaned into Jessica’s side. Jessica rested a hand on her large belly. Serena lifted it and placed her own hand beneath.
“Mommy,” Serena whispered, and reminded Jessica of what they had done when Boy George’s mother brought her to visit two years before. Jessica helped Serena count the change, and then they walked over to buy a bagel from a vending machine. Serena slipped the coins in the slot and pressed the button; inmates weren’t allowed to touch money.
Soon it was time for pictures. The inmate photographer suggested that they take the photographs outdoors. Ordinarily, Jessica loved having her picture taken. When George was in the M.C.C., he would say, “Baby, take a roll of thirty-six.” He sent her magazine pictures of poses for her to copy. Now she seemed self-conscious and tentative. Instead of turning to the side to show off her profile, as most girls did when they were pregnant, she faced the camera. She removed her prison-issue glasses and positioned herself beside a bush. Serena looked as though she wanted to slip behind the thick, scratchy branches, but Jessica hugged her in. “Come on,” Jessica said quietly. She took Serena’s hand. Serena placed her other hand on her hip and tried to smile.
After the twins were born, Jessica returned to prison in a dark mood. Her feelings for Díaz had cooled. “Whatever I felt for him, it all turned dead when he didn’t turn up in the hospital,” she said. She was glad that she’d decided to carry the pregnancy to term, but she hardly saw her sons before Evelyn came to collect them. One of the officers who was assigned to Jessica’s hospital room even confiscated the babies’ footprints. Close friends knew to leave her alone. She slept a lot and refused to eat. She brooded for days at a time.
Evelyn and Lourdes had planned to raise the twins, but this arrangement soon fell apart, and the boys followed their older siblings to Rosa. But this was only Jessica’s latest disappointment with her mother. Lourdes rarely visited or wrote, and she almost never sent money. When she appeared at Danbury, the summer after the boys were born, her daughter was initially less than welcoming.
“She finally getting tits,” Jessica said, gazing at her mother. “Ma, you fat. You aren’t just chubby, you are fat. So tell me, what, are you pregnant or is it a tumor or what?”
“I don’t know,” Lourdes said beseechingly. She pouted into her double chin. “I have to go to the doctor’s. That’s why I can’t stay. I have to see a social worker.”
“You don’t need to see no social worker. You can talk to me.”
“Do my hair?” Lourdes’s hair was long, and when she lifted it off her neck Jessica noticed that she was wearing the gold chain with the two tiny gold boxing gloves. Jessica touched them tenderly. “He’d be surprised that I still have that,” Jessica said. “Probably thinks I sold it.” Then she asked Lourdes the questions she always asked. It was a litany of lost objects, as if Jessica could never accept her mother’s failure to safeguard what she was holding for her. What became of the purple shearling coat? The leathers? The gold chains? The rings?
Lourdes recited her lines: “I don’t know,” and “I told you.” She let the implication of the pauses do the work. Jessica bent forward. “Give me your earrings,” she whispered. She sat back and said casually, “Let me try your earrings on.”
“Be careful,” Lourdes warned, glancing at the guard on duty.
“One hand washes the other,” Jessica said, explaining that the guard was “a friend.”
“Sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” Lourdes said.
After the visit, Lourdes stood outside waiting for Jessica to be searched, so she could appear in a window for a final wave goodbye.
Lourdes retrieved a charm bracelet from her pocket and slipped it on. It was a gift from a new boyfriend, whom Jessica didn’t approve of, because she’d heard he was violent. The letters spelled out “love.” “Good thing she didn’t take this,” Lourdes said. “I’d have to get another one new! See how she took my earrings like that?”
Jessica appeared. Lourdes waved. She waved with every step down the hill until she couldn’t see her daughter anymore.
LITTLE JESSICA
The longer Jessica was in prison, the more strongly she identified with her ten-year-old daughter. Although they had very little contact, she felt she could imagine what Serena was going through. In 1996, Queenie offered to tell Jessica’s fortune for her birthday. She told Jessica that Serena was going to run away. “You’re never gonna see her again,” she warned. Jessica couldn’t get Queenie’s prophecy out of her head. Her mind filled with memories of herself as a teen-ager, when she had sometimes cut herself to relieve the anguish. Would things be as bad for her daughter? “Serena reminds me of me,” Jessica often said.
But it was Rosa and Marisol who oversaw the girl’s coming of age. In 1996, Serena learned that her favorite aunt was moving to Troy. By then, Joey was back in prison, and he had married another woman. Marisol and her children would be just four doors down from Rosa’s. Serena was thrilled. On the brick wall below the white siding next to the front door, Serena chalked, in screwball script, the words “Marisol’s House.
Marisol’s door was always open to Jessica’s kids. Marisol let Serena and her friends rollerblade around the kitchen and living room, and she would abandon her housework “like the quickness” to join the girls in double-dutch. While Marisol cooked, Serena would sit on the counter, keeping her company. They watched talk shows and traded advice. Serena complained to Marisol about Rosa’s rules. Rosa’s discipline seemed onerous: when Serena started developing, Rosa wouldn’t allow her to wear anything tight or revealing. Marisol defended Serena: “She look beautiful. She all into her body.”
“She a child, Marisol,” Rosa said. “It ain’t right.”
By 1997, Rosa was working full time. She needed Serena to help with her younger siblings, and Serena, now twelve, chafed at the responsibility. She was already looking eternally bored—languishing in doorways, leaning against parked cars, scuffing the dirt around the neighborhood’s embattled trees. After school, whenever she could, she brought her little brothers to Marisol’s house.
Marisol noted that she had inherited her mother’s voluptuous body, and privately referred to her as “a little Jessica.” She also served as a mail drop, relaying messages from Jessica to Serena, and providing Serena with stationery and stamps to write her mother back. More and more, the subject of boys appeared in Serena’s letters, after updates on her twin sisters and brothers, and on her progress in school. In March of 1998, Serena wrote:
Marisol and Rosa had the same hopes for Serena—that she not get pregnant, that she finish school, maybe even go to college—but their strategies were different. Rosa’s approach was to repress all signs of womanhood, whereas Marisol thought it wiser to tell Serena the truths as she knew them. Still, Marisol found it hard to be optimistic: one of Serena’s friends already had a baby, and another was expecting. “She’ll come out pregnant when she’s young,” Marisol predicted dolefully.
When Lourdes and the girls visited Jessica in the spring of 1998, eight months before her release date, she was in a sombre mood. She had been in a residential-therapy unit, and her abandonment of Serena increasingly haunted her. She worried less about the twins; they really belonged to Rosa, who had raised them since they were babies. But Serena was old enough to have memories of the early days. Jessica wondered what Serena remembered of Boy George, or of her father, Kuri, who had been shot dead around the time Jessica went to prison.
After Jessica greeted the girls, they sat together in a corner of the visiting room, and Jessica started her usual primping and grooming. She styled the twins’ hair, using her fingers as a comb, and picked lint from their clothes. She noticed a plastic price-tag thread on Serena’s shoe and bit it off. She braided Serena’s hair and started to talk to her about the kind of night life they would share when she came home. “They gonna think we sisters. We gonna dye our hair blond. We don’t have to ask anybody. I be like, ‘C’mon, Serena, get dressed! We going to a club!’ ”
“Ay,” Lourdes said, but the exasperation felt fraudulent.
“You just jealous,” Jessica said. When she was a teen-ager, she took her mother dancing. She made Lourdes pretend they were sisters, but the ruse wouldn’t work anymore. Lourdes had aged visibly over the past several years. She lumbered instead of scurrying—circulatory problems made it hard for her to walk. Smock dresses had replaced the Lycra leggings. Hush Puppies had replaced the stiletto heels.
Serena flapped her knees distractedly. “Your legs! Keep your legs closed!” Lourdes said sharply. Serena rolled her eyes.
Jessica noticed the young son of another inmate. He stood beside another boy in front of the vending machines. “Serena, come on. Look how cute that boy is!”
“You so bad,” Serena said.
“Come on! Come on! You so pretty! Look how cute he is!” Jessica pulled Serena’s hand and positioned her in line. Serena bought some candy. She leaned into Jessica, shyly.
“You so bad, you so bad,” Serena repeated. Jessica smiled.
STEPPING OUT
At eight-fifty in the morning on December 17, 1998, exactly seven years after she entered prison, Jessica left the Danbury Correctional Facility. She took a bus to Port Authority and then a subway to the Bronx. She had a streak of gray in her hair and twenty-five extra pounds. She was thirty years old.
Boy George, in a maximum-security prison cell in Beaumont, Texas, said that he was happy about Jessica’s freedom. “Not envious at all,” he said. “I was praying for her the other day.” The only thing that worried him, he said, was Jessica’s susceptibility to the influence of others. “She’s got to say, ‘Am I gonna be a free-for-all? Or am I gonna be a person who has limits here?’ Is it all about sex, Calvin Klein, is she gonna parlay with that? Or is she gonna say, ‘I got five children. Now, that’s a lot of children.’ ” He paused. “If she doesn’t find the right man, she did all that time for nothing. She did that time for shit.”
He said that he’d like to hear from Jessica, whom he affectionately calls “the troubled child,” or “the crazy one.” Boy George has written letters to Jessica in care of Lourdes, but he hasn’t heard from her.
After her release from prison, Jessica spent December and the early part of January, 1999, in a halfway house just north of Fordham Road, in the Bronx. The halfway house was on a block with a brisk drug trade. Jessica got a job in Yonkers at a company that raises funds for churches and schools. Toward the end of January, she was allowed to move in with her sister, Evelyn. Five months later, she got her own place, a basement apartment in the north Bronx.
Jessica met her current boyfriend, Gabriel, when she went dancing one night at Jimmy’s Bronx Café. A student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in Manhattan, he is thirty-two, and wants to pursue a career in law enforcement. There are always going to be criminals, he says, and there will always be a need for people to catch them. Gabriel lifts weights six times a week, and his body is muscular and well defined. He works as a recreation specialist at a state park and, to supplement his income, sometimes performs as a stripper. He is polite but reserved. “He sounds Italian,” Jessica says, happily. Jessica has dated other men since getting out of prison, but this is different.
Within days of their meeting, she brought Lourdes to meet him. Lourdes promptly warned him to treat Jessica properly, because “my daughter’s been abused enough.” She then crowned him as her son-in-law. On the ride home, when Jessica told her that Gabriel attended John Jay College, Lourdes nearly yelped. “Not everybody gets to go to that college,” she shouted, as though a victory had been won. She ordered Jessica not to play head games with him.
Jessica hopes that Gabriel is the one. He calls her back when she pages him. He lets her know of his whereabouts, especially when he goes out with his friends. He writes her love notes, leaves tender messages on her answering machine, offers little gifts—a Beanie Baby, vanilla shower gel. She wants to lose the weight she gained in prison, and he has promised to help her, although he tells her that he likes her body just the way it is.
Since September of last year, Serena has had a boyfriend, Manuel, a slender boy with liquid eyes and a Roman nose. To Rosa’s way of thinking, a nineteen-year-old with earrings and a tattoo is only interested in one thing. As soon as she found out about him, she forbade Serena to date him. “All she was doing was caring, but caring for me in the wrong way,” Serena says. She and Manuel met on the sly. Serena says, “I grew to love him, I had to see him. I’d call him when she was in the bathroom, tell him, ‘Meet me at Video World.’ ” She’d run through the housing project, taking the dirt path that led behind the dollar store, and jump into his idling Sunbird. He took her to McDonald’s and treated her to her favorite Value Meal. “He always made sure I had, regardless,” Serena says.
Jessica has supported the relationship between Serena and Manuel. During Christmas vacation, she arranged for a rendezvous between them in the Bronx; shortly afterward, though, Rosa learned that Serena had failed all her classes, and grounded her. Jessica and Serena commiserated on the telephone, sometimes three times a day. Friction increased between Rosa and Jessica. Marisol worries about Serena’s being torn between the two, but now she has a fifth child and a full-time job, and she has little time to spare for her own children, let alone her niece.
FULL CUSTODY
In February; Jessica filed for full custody of Serena. Rosa has not contested the application; she believes that Serena will be safe with Jessica, and Serena wants to move back to the Bronx. Last month, Jessica and Lourdes went up to Troy for the custody hearing. That morning, after Serena had put her four-year-old brothers on their school bus, she, her mother, and her grandmother watched the movie “Gremlins” in the sala, surrounded by mementos from birthday parties and baby showers and christenings. Serena and Jessica cuddled on the sofa. Serena had pulled her hair back loosely in a bun. She wore a black cotton peasant dress with bright embroidery trim, which Lourdes had given her. She looked the way Jessica does in a photograph taken at her baby shower, just before Serena was born.
“You didn’t even notice my new tattoo,” Jessica prompted Serena coyly. She lifted her chin to the light. She had a beauty mark inked above her lip, on the left, just like Marilyn Monroe.
“I told you already,” Serena said, brushing her away good-naturedly.
Jessica explained that the friend who gave her the mole had promised to alter her six Boy George tattoos for free. She traced her body with her manicured fingernail, showing how she planned to cover the poem on her shoulder with a butterfly, to blacken the George from the heart on her right thigh. She wanted to get a new tattoo around her ankle: the two masks of drama, with the inscription “Cry now, laugh later,” the inversion meant to celebrate her new life.
“What are you gonna be, a newspaper?” Lourdes asked.
“That’s art,” Jessica said.
“That’s fucking disgusting,” Lourdes said. “When a man kisses you—”
“If a man can’t handle it, that’s his problem,” Jessica said.
“ ‘Property of George’ across your ass?” Lourdes went on. She kept her eyes on the TV.
Serena and Jessica went upstairs to dress. Serena’s bedroom walls were covered with magazine cutouts of Puff Daddy, Whitney Houston, Ginuwine, and Lauryn Hill. Beside them she’d hung photographs of Jessica, Evelyn, and Marisol with her children, and several drawings that Jessica sent her from prison. In one, a melancholy angel drops a handful of hearts down to earth from a cloud. On the old entertainment center that she uses as a bureau is a favor from a cousin’s Sweet Sixteen: a girl in a fancy dress afloat in a champagne glass, purple and white ribbons spilling from the rim. Although Serena is only fourteen, she and Jessica have already started to plan for her party, so that they’ll have time to save. Serena wants to pass out flyers the way night clubs do, and trail a banner behind a Goodyear blimp. Anything’s possible, Jessica told her.
Jessica popped in a house tape she’d brought, a gift from Gabriel. Music blasted from the speakers.
“Jessica! Serena! Turn down the music!” Lourdes yelled. Then she came upstairs to join them.
Serena outfitted her grandmother in a pair of sweats, and loaned her a pair of sneakers, a gift from Manuel. He also gave Serena a necklace that reads “I Love My Baby,” for Valentine’s Day. Serena likes jewelry, but she has forbidden her mother to wear the necklace with the gold boxing-glove charm; she has heard about how Boy George used to mistreat Jessica, and doesn’t like what it represents.
At the custody hearing, everyone agreed that Serena should finish the school year in Troy and stay on for the summer, in order to complete an internship at an educational and employment-training program for public-housing kids that Rosa steered her toward.
Lourdes was evicted from her apartment recently, and is currently camped out on a futon sofa at Jessica’s, where she feels in the way. Just before Lourdes’s arrival, Jessica quit her job; she says that her boss was disrespectful to her. Moreover, the hours had not been ideal. Jessica wants her next job to be strictly nine-to-five, so that it won’t intrude upon her responsibilities. “When five o’clock comes,” she says, “and I have to go home and cook and take care of my daughter, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Jessica says that her main concern is her family: her reunion with Serena, her relationships with Gabriel and with her other children, her mother’s precarious health.
Lourdes is unsure of Jessica’s future. She marvels at her daughter’s ability to sustain such open faith in love: “A broken rib, that mends. A broken heart, that never mends.” She is more confident about her granddaughter’s prospects. If she were to tell it straight to Serena, she would say this: “Honey; the boys that are growing up now, it’s only for your pussy. A girl has to be smart now. Study. Be somebody.” If you’re ignorant, Lourdes believes, you have to use your looks to survive, but with an education you can support yourself, men or no men. “They respect you, because they know they could lose you right there and then.”
Four days a week, Serena takes the bus to her program, in downtown Troy. She drops her book bag and plunks herself down in front of a state-of-the-art computer. She spins around on the office chair as she waits for the modem to connect. Self-portraits of public-housing kids surround her, alongside African proverbs and quotations from Olive Schreiner. A poster reads, “Keep It Afloat.”
Serena loves computers. Her current project involves developing her own Web site. On it, she has posted her autobiography: “My name is Serena. I am 14 years old. I am Puerto Rican, 100% . . . . My favorite subjects are English and Math. Lunch is my favorite time of the school day because I get to talk to my friends. . . .
“My birth mother was put in prison when I was five years old. . . . I decided to move with my twin sisters’ godmother because they were living with her. She took me in with no problem. None of us are her real kids, but she still took all of us . . . kids in and raised us as her own. My birth mother is now out of jail, and I am moving with her in the summer to catch up on our relationship. . . .
“In the future, I would like to be a teacher. I would first like to finish high school and go on to college. When I’m done with school, I would like to work on getting a nice house and getting a good job. Then I would like to get married and have two kids, a boy and a girl. Then I just want to raise my kids. When they are all grown up, I want to travel the world.
“I want to teach kindergarten class because they are easier than older kids. I would like to go to Fordham University. It is in Bronx, NY, where I used to live.” ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment