The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (11 page)

Rob did get lost, and not by accident. Because of football, he was able to feel like he could come to St. Benedict's each morning and take advantage of its curriculum and facilities without buying into its philosophies. He showed up on time, sang the songs, and went through the motions without ever fully engaging with them, as if he were in on the joke that his friends from the neighborhood were in on. And the moment classes ended each day, he was out the door, on the bus, then on the field, in pads, standing among the boys he lived with, bashing his head against theirs.

Immediately, the smartest kids at St. Benedict's stood out; the school encouraged this by posting grades in the hallways. The majority of this
subset commuted from the suburbs, where they had attended private middle schools and their families were intact. Their good grades were, in the oversimplified view of less fortunate peers, a given. For the students of lesser means, part of the sacrifice of coming to a school like St. Benedict's was the knowledge that they would never be among the smartest in the class.

Which was why, when cumulative GPAs first went up halfway through the fall of freshman year, and Robert Peace was listed along with three other names at the top with 4.0s, guys were confused. Nobody knew much about Rob yet, just that he did the football thing and lived west of downtown and strutted around with a dour expression on his face while referring to himself as “Shawn.” Once his grades were made public, a collective perception formed of a wealthy, well-educated black kid from the suburbs who walked around acting like he was from the hood.

The year might have continued like that, with St. Benedict's being a school Rob attended rather than an ideal he was a part of, if not for the clumsy bureaucracy of the Orange School Board. A month into the football season, an administrator filing insurance forms noticed that two names on the football roster weren't registered in the Orange system. The next day, as they hustled out onto the field for practice, Rob and Victor learned that they could no longer play football due to the insurance liability. Rob took it hard, but Jackie had no patience for her son suddenly moping around. She'd disapproved of the football situation anyway—her son busing all over town among the transients, not taking full advantage of his own school campus that she was stretching herself thinner than ever just to pay for, all so that he could participate in legalized violence alongside boys she wished he didn't know anyway.

“What am I going to do now?” he mumbled.

“St. B's has sports teams,” she replied. “Lots of them. Find one and join it.”

He laughed. “Like what,
fencing
?”

“Well, you wear a helmet, just like in football.”

“Mom, please.”

“You want to play football?” Jackie said, feeling an energy surge that was rare for her these days. “Because I'm sure as hell fine to take you out of that school and send you to Orange High. You can play as much football as you want there.”

He thought about her words and looked away, momentarily silent. And Jackie smiled; as with his father, she rarely got the last word in with her son.

W
AYNE
R
IDLEY HAD
graduated from St. Benedict's in 1990, and he'd started teaching and coaching there the year before Rob arrived. He'd grown up in Irvington, just west of downtown Newark, in that gray area between the heavily policed city blocks and the outlying wilderness where the neighborhoods truly began to fray. He coached the swim team, and in the late fall of 1994 a powerfully built but still soft freshman approached him about joining.

“Sure,” Coach Ridley said. “You in shape?”

“Yeah.”

“Come out this afternoon and swim some laps.”

Rob didn't reply. His limbs were a little short for a swimmer; he had muscle there, but no litheness, no grace.

“You have something else you need to do? Because you came to me, here.”

“No,” Rob said, “it's just that I don't swim.”

“You don't swim?”

“I mean, I don't know how to swim.”

During practice that day, while the team swam their daily 240 laps—six thousand yards, or a little less than four miles—Rob lowered himself into the half lane adjacent to the wall. Coach Ridley began guiding him through the physical dynamics of freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly. He understood the toll this took on the boy's pride: splashing slowly and clumsily while the pool teemed with two dozen boys his age cruising swiftly through the water. And Rob came off as a particularly prideful kid. Ridley didn't expect him to last more than a few days—
especially when Rob ditched the second practice, claiming that he had sprained his back as a result of sneezing while simultaneously grabbing milk out of his refrigerator at home. But he came back, and by the end of the winter swim team season he could handle himself capably enough in the water to come out for the polo team the following fall.

Swimming and water polo were “cool” sports at St. Benedict's, and Tavarus Hester was the prized recruit of the freshman class. Tavarus was short and scrawny but a natural and experienced swimmer. He had grown up in East Orange with a single parent. His was a rare case in which the mother had abandoned the family—she would disappear for stretches of six months or a year throughout his childhood, and she fled for good when Tavarus was twelve. He and his older brother had been raised by their father, a good man, a good parent, Tavarus's best friend. In the spring of eighth grade, Tavarus's father died suddenly of cancer. He'd gone to the doctor with a persistent stomachache one afternoon, and three months later was buried. Tavarus's admission to St. Benedict's with significant financial aid had been the last positive thing that had happened before his father died. Tavarus now lived with his aunt and grandmother, provided for by Social Security checks, and he'd entered St. Benedict's in a conscious state of not giving a fuck about anything except drinking, smoking—and swimming.

Tavarus had been assigned to Rob's color group, so he knew him a little better than the rest of their classmates. During the fall of freshman year, he'd sensed an anger in Rob that ran parallel to his own. So when football was taken away, he told Rob to come swim. He tried to explain how there was something cathartic about being in the water. You stared down at the thick black line scrolling steadily beneath you, and all you heard was the rush of water past your ears, and a life that at times felt cosmically complicated was reduced to the simplest elements: oxygen, buoyancy, propulsion.

Rob listened, and because he did, through swim team practice that winter and water polo the following autumn, he met the four friends who would compose the daily heart and rhythm of his life until its end.

D
REW
J
EMISON GREW UP
in Montclair, a middle-class suburb northeast of the Oranges. His father had left when he was four, but his mother's boyfriend, Snow, had been a steadfast presence since then—not a father exactly, but the next best thing. Drew was massive, with a booming voice that belied his relatively soft sensibilities. He wasn't a brawler because he didn't have to be; just by standing up straight he projected an assurance of never being confronted about anything. He played goalie, his wide shoulders and long arms all but blocking the whole net.

Julius “Flowy” Starkes was tall and almost cartoonishly thin, with a long face that gave him an ever-present hangdog expression. He and his twin sister, Tess, had grown up in the worst of poverty, their father killed by violence and their mother troubled enough to practically destroy their formative years, yet functional enough that social services had never intervened in their home on 18th Avenue off the Garden State Parkway. They lived in the very center of greater Newark's web of drugs and violence, a place where lethality hovered close by always. People called him Flowy for his ability to exist casually in a grid of blocks where men and boys could be killed simply for walking down a street they didn't live on. He was all good with everyone; he just flowed. The last words he remembered hearing from his father, without much momentousness, were, “You ain't gonna live to see twenty-one.” But his uncle was the dean of discipline at St. Benedict's, and Flowy had chosen to apply to and pay for St. Benedict's fully on his own, using Social Security checks for supplies. He'd undertaken this mainly because he'd known that going to public school, with girls, would sentence him to fatherhood by age sixteen, and he wanted to evade that pattern, one from which he himself had been born. At six five and 150 pounds soaking wet, he was awkward in the hallways, barely able to wedge himself behind the classroom desks. But in the pool, he was in control, and with a sharp scissor kick could elevate his body from the water up to the waist and extend his long arms still higher for towering, indefensible shot angles.

Curtis Gamble was an amiable leader in the school immediately. He
was curious, easygoing, hilarious: the boy who knew how best to spend each hour. His mother was white, his father was black, and they were both schoolteachers. Their home on Smith Street in East Orange was about a mile southeast of Rob's and would provide a refuge and a family for the rest of the newly formed crew—particularly Tavarus, Flowy, and Rob, none of whom had ever known truly what those two words meant. Curtis, with his relatively comfortable circumstances and laid-back approach to life, served as a model, the person they all wanted to be more like, the son they wanted to raise themselves someday.

The boys knew very few of these details about one another at first; they didn't talk about their lives, their histories, their problems. Instead, they talked about music. They talked about what they wanted to eat. They talked about weekend parties that may or may not have been happening. They talked about practice and their hard-ass teachers and coaches. They talked about the momentary wants and obligations of their daily lives, the way all boys did. But their unvoiced pasts, the way their stories bridged and intersected and illuminated each other, formed the foundation upon which their bond grew—as well as the fact that they were members of what they assumed to be the only all-minority water polo team in the country, maybe even the world.

When semester grades were posted freshman year, with Rob's name again clustered at the top of the list with a 4.0, he noticed that Tavarus was on the other end of the spectrum with a 0.7. Rob had known that Tavarus was struggling emotionally, but he didn't know how badly until he saw the atrocious figure. Without mentioning the grades or alluding to any personal issues that spawned them, he organized a weekly study group after swim team practice. Rob didn't need the group, and indeed spending nights helping his friends catch up actually hindered him from getting farther ahead. But he observed the depressive pattern Tavarus was in, and here was a tangible way to help.

Usually Curtis's mother would pick up the boys downtown and bring them home to Smith Street. She would make sure everyone was fed—a laborious and calorically expensive task with five high school
boys swimming the miles that they did, but she could tell there was minimal nourishment occurring in their own homes. The basement, adjacent to a laundry area, was cramped and penned in by metal storage shelves and boxes of old clothes. But it had a refrigerator stocked with soda, and the boys made it into a clubhouse of sorts, cramming themselves into the stuffy subterranean space with their books nestled on their laps. There, for hours on end, Rob would tell them what they had to know in each of their classes, including the ones he wasn't taking himself. Curtis's father was usually upstairs watching the news or prepping his lesson plans for the following day at school. To Rob and Flowy, his simple and constant presence was something to marvel at and, perhaps, envy. To Tavarus, Mr. Gamble was like a mirage of some kinder present day than that which he'd been granted. Then Mr. Gamble would speak, making abstract-sounding statements that almost always started, “When you all head off to college . . .” He spoke as if this, college, were a given.

The house at 34 Smith Street (incidentally, less than a block from where Georgianna Broadway and Deborah Neal had shared their house) was within walking distance of all except Drew's. The house—­specifically, the basement—became the physical center of the boys' lives, where any or all of them could be found at any given hour when they weren't at school, and sometimes when they should have been. They were comfortable there, warm, fed, far from conflicts. On the foundation of this sudden, unexpected stability, the boys built a brotherhood, a family structure that was easy and permanent and good.

M
ILLIONS OF LEAVES
fluttered overhead. Water flowed along a ravine beneath them, from snowpack in the Catskills a hundred miles north. On either side, woods stretched out, impenetrable. Ahead and behind, the packed dirt of the trail meandered steadily, definitively through them. The air was sweet and washed and full of oxygen, though slightly tainted by the odor of 150 boys marching through it in a line two hun
dred yards long. Once in a while they would crest a rise and the view would open up, and still all they saw were more trees and maybe a distant church steeple to mark a town isolated in all the nature.

The fifty-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail, from High Point State Park to the Delaware Water Gap, was the physical and metaphorical completion of their first year of high school. Most complained about the heavy packs, blistered feet, mosquito bites, and the too-fast pace set by Coach Ridley up at the front of the column. Rob, who had been elected leader of his subgroup of eight students, was quiet during the walking phases but turned vocal during the camp setup and cooking. He seemed to derive a purpose and efficiency from what they were doing—carrying their own load as they covered a specified number of miles each day—that eluded most of his classmates. When they finally boarded the bus to go home, they were pumped full of endorphins and the once-a-year glee that accompanied the beginning of summer. Back in Newark a few hours later, its neighborhoods could not have felt more claustrophobic. Many of the boys had never before registered the fact that their hometown had the smallest proportion of open space per person of any city in the country.