The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (16 page)

Rob studying at his usual spot in Yale's Pierson College dining hall during exam week.

Chapter 6

I
ENTERED MY NEW HOME
, a quad on the fourth floor of Lanman-Wright Hall, with both of my parents trailing behind me. My dad carried a small table, my mom an armload of new sheets. Dad was in a lousy mood; the four-hour drive from Delaware had been followed by thirty minutes jockeying for a parking spot near the eastern gate of Old Campus, the gorgeous, sprawling quad in which most Yale freshmen lived—and now he had to contend with the stairs. After listening to him swear and honk as if the hundreds of other packed cars had no right to be there, barging in upon Jackie and Rob was jolting. They were just sitting in the common room, almost submissively still—resigned, even. For a moment, the harried commotion that accompanied twelve hundred eighteen-year-olds moving into a single building over a four-hour time window ceased entirely, replaced by the feeling that we'd interrupted a moment whose gravity lay far beyond me.

His single duffel bag had been tossed on the floor in the left-hand bedroom, and a small, bunny-eared TV was lying on its side in the common room. Random handprints marked the film of dust coating the blank gray screen. Rob wore jeans and a T-shirt, and his close-cropped hair made his face look very young, which belied his deep voice as he shook my mother's hand first, officiously, and said, “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Hobbs.” Then he shook my father's.

“Chuck Hobbs,” Dad said. He appreciated a firm handshake, and I could tell he approved of Rob's grip. I had no idea what weight might lie
within that grip on Rob's part. My Dad was handsome and fit, and when he wasn't trying to park a car he was gracious and kind. Whereas Rob's father was an inmate, mine was a surgeon. Dad's primary advice to me in preparing for college was to take easy intro classes the first semester. (“Christ,” he said, “I took some philosophy course my first semester of college, thinking it'd expand my mind or something, and it just about killed me.”)

To Jackie, Dad said, “How are you doing today, ma'am? Bad traffic?”

“Wasn't much,” Jackie replied, a little glumly. She had gray in her short hair, a slight underbite that gave her a miffed expression, and very little interest in engaging with the Hobbses even as her eyes seemed to probe each of us.

Rob nodded in my direction and said, “'Sup.” We performed a half handshake, half hand slap gesture at the level of our waists. I put my bags on the floor, not sure whether etiquette called for me to move into the room Rob had already chosen or wait for our other two roommates.

In the self-centered context of my arrival at college, I never thought to wonder where Rob's dad was. I was too eager to peek into the bedrooms and confirm that the rumors of their dimensions had been true. Everyone downstairs was comparing them to prison cells. With measurements of seven by twelve, they were actually larger than the six-by-eight cells at Trenton State.

My mom was heartened that my rooming situation would include some diversity, and she became overly chatty with Rob: “Have you thought about what classes you're taking?” “So you play . . . water polo?” “I guess all these stairs will keep you boys in shape!” Rob humored her politely. After a time, she occupied herself with measuring all the windows for curtains she was planning to make on her sewing machine and bring with her on Parents' Day in two months. My dad and I plowed through a half dozen trips to the car for clothes, school supplies, lamps, and tables. Each time we entered the room, Rob and Jackie seemed to be in the same curious state of doing nothing, not even talking. When the transfer was finished, Dad and I were both sweaty and stiff, and he was
eager to beat the traffic home. He shook my hand and made a quick exit so as to hide reluctant tears; my mother embraced me, letting her own tears flow, and left as well: both parts of the ritual I had witnessed in this same dorm between them and my older siblings and so understood well. We felt nostalgic and perhaps a bit gloomy—this moment was a milestone that represented aging for them and the removal of childhood cushions for me—but not traumatized. We all knew that life hadn't actually changed all that much.

Once they were gone, I realized that Jackie was now sitting on the windowsill overlooking a stone courtyard. Below her, a herd of students milled around, introducing themselves with a breathy, manic energy, exchanging hometowns and entryway assignments. Some were dressed in a style akin to business-casual; others wore PJs. Almost all were white and cheery and well-heeled, some veterans of mass move-ins after four years at elite boarding schools. Music played from speakers facing outward from someone's window: Guns n' Roses' “Sweet Child o' Mine.” Jackie had barely moved all afternoon and had yet to appear anything other than impassively observant—judgmental, even, and I felt compelled to perform for her somehow, to show that her son would not be living with just another wealthy legacy kid (though I was both wealthy and a legacy). I offered to get her some water, to remove bags from a chair so that she could sit, to make a pizza run. She declined each outreach: “Nah, nah, I'm all right.” Rob, too, seemed to be studying our surroundings and the people newly inhabiting them, the subtle negotiations already taking place over bunk assignments, bathroom stations, and furniture arrangement, the wide-eyed marveling over the bedroom sizes. He must have been thinking about Summer Phase at St. Benedict's, his 140 classmates with their sleeping bags in the Hive, tasked with memorizing one another's names by week's end.

Our other two roommates arrived. Dan Murray was a white guy from Seattle, his father a doctor like mine. He wore preppy clothes and carried a plastic water bottle with him at all times. He spoke very fast and in a high voice, such that it was impossible to understand him at first.
Ty Cantey was “blackasian” (black father, Japanese mother) and he ran the four-hundred-meter hurdles, my event. He hailed from San Jose, California, where his father was a NASA engineer. A nearly flawless physical specimen, with chest and arms chiseled like a Greek sculpture, Ty had me intimidated before I even set foot on the track that year. The reasoning behind our “random” rooming assignment was clear: Ty and I were together because we both ran track, Ty and Rob were together because they were both African American, and Dan had been tacked on as a white suburban kid like me to fill out the quad. Ty and I ended up sharing one bedroom, because we figured we'd be waking up early for practice and track meets together. Dan and Rob took the other room. Unstated but thickly understood was the fact that the “right” thing to do was to mix our races. Rob and Ty both claimed the bottom bunks; Dan and I politely ceded them. Dan had gone on the weeklong FOOT trip, an Appalachian Trail hike for incoming freshmen. Ty had participated in PROP, an orientation retreat for minorities during which they'd stayed at a nearby camping ground and played games like capture the flag. They had both already made friends, had begun to construct social lives here in a way that Rob and I hadn't. They flitted in and out of the dorm while Rob and I mostly stayed put, neither of us ready to join the fracas outside.

Rob set himself up in the room silently but directedly, never asking permission or guidance on where to put things. For decoration, he pinned two pictures to the wall. One was of him and his mother at his St. Benedict's graduation. The other was of him, Curtis, Tavarus, Drew, and Flowy standing over a smoky grill in the backyard of 34 Smith Street, making “East Side” hand gestures: the right hand extended palm in, fingers splayed except for the overlapping middle and ring fingers to form a warped E. With their baggy jeans, ribbed undershirts, and skullcaps, they looked like a gang. As I spent the late afternoon organizing my desk with tchotchkes and pictures of family, he walked his mother downstairs to her car. Their goodbye, which took place among the honking lines of expensive foreign cars still coming and going, must have lasted
forty-five minutes.

T
HE FIRST WEEK
of college, in my recollection, was a collective celebration of freedom. By day, this took the form of endless ceremonial speeches, extracurricular bazaars, and focus groups on sexual education. By night, more than a thousand eighteen-year-olds, many of whom had never truly “partied” before, engaged in some serious binge drinking. The shared bathrooms began to exude a vomit stench onto the stairwell landings. We lined up outside entryways and frat houses waiting for our rations of stale keg beer. We crowded into Yorkside Pizza and Rudy's Bar hoping to not be carded, which we always were. It was as if all of these kids had spent so long working so hard to get here that the reaction to actually being here was to become idiots. The RA fixed a paper bin filled with hundreds of multicolored condoms to the bulletin board in each entryway; the bins were empty by the following morning, prompting a sign that read
ONLY TAKE IF YOU ARE ACTUALLY GOING TO USE THEM!
Kids sectored off into giddy groups that seemed preordained: the Manhattanites, the Midwesterners, the Californians, the Northeastern boarding schoolers, the internationals. Already coursing through the freshman class was the confident recognition—fostered in no small part by the university—that we were the elite, and these four years would be our passageway to flourishing in whatever arena we chose, and in the midst of that passage we were entitled to celebrate our status freely, often sloppily.

Rob wasn't sloppy. When he was in the room, he methodically paged through his Blue Book, the three-inch-thick paperback of course listings, with an almost menacing seriousness. He spoke in mumbled monosyllables as we gradually furnished and decorated: “Huh,” “Yeah,” “Cool.” Sometimes I would pass him in the courtyard, sitting on a bench or a stone pillar smoking cigarettes, usually alone.

The Yale student body, much like St. Benedict's, was divided into groups within the group in what was called the “residential college sys
tem.” Though almost all freshmen lived on Old Campus, our social lives were tagged to one of twelve colleges situated around the university, each with its own distinct architecture, dining hall, library, and “master”—a designated professor who lived in a home affixed to the dorm, there to provide guidance and oversight. We were in Pierson College, a Georgian building that wrapped around a grass courtyard on the northwest corner of campus. The first time the one hundred members of the Pierson Class of '02 congregated together, we were on the slate patio outside the dining hall. Rob stood on the fringe, wearing baggy jeans, Timberland boots, and a “skully,” a tight, thin piece of black nylon fabric in the shape of a stingray, the wing tips of which he bound at the base of his cranium. He was smoking a cigarette, his back turned to us. The classmates who hadn't met him yet clearly figured him to be a dining hall worker or part of the maintenance staff. He did nothing to dispel this notion. In fact, he seemed to take pride in it. Like his mother on move-in day, he harbored little interest in interacting with the rest of us. Though I'd made an effort to be friendly enough, I kept my distance in those moments. An uncle had advised me not to get too chummy with my roommates early on, because it was easier to become better friends than to extricate yourself from someone you didn't like.

In a way that at the time felt natural but perhaps a bit too deliberate, I thought having a black roommate was fortunate. Though my high school was demographically the opposite of Rob's—90 percent white—I was a national-caliber hurdler and had spent my summers traveling and rooming with mostly black runners at Junior Olympic meets. As a result of many long, cramped van rides, I had a familiarity with popular hip-hop artists of the day, I was conversant in certain strands of street lingo (“That's
tight
!”), and I knew how to play spades. Overall, I considered myself quite the “honorary black man,” a title with which my old teammates had laughingly graced me. In the dining hall, I would seek out Rob and sit with him. To the extent that I could, I tried to subtly intimate how well qualified I was to be his pal, dropping small hints as to my comfort level among urban black males, omitting or
outright lying about certain details that might undermine the claim. I told him I'd grown up “near Philly,” when in fact I had grown up in an ­eighteenth-century farmhouse on fifteen acres of rolling rural hills in Chester County, thirty miles from the city. I consciously failed to mention that I'd attended private school beginning in prekindergarten, and that my parents, who had been married for almost thirty years, had invested their entire lives (not to mention their finances) into taking care of their four children—removing all uncertainty from our formative years. The two Labradors, the trips to Florida each spring, the sports camps, the annual late-summer mall trips for new school clothes, the pool behind our house—none of these flourishes of my life seemed to come up. Whether out of sensitivity or amusement, Rob never clued me in to the fact that, despite a few track meets, we hailed from different worlds, different families, different perspectives—different everything. I would learn that on my own, over the course of many months and never at my friend's behest. In the beginning, we were able to laugh over the fact that I was a white guy who ran sprints and he was a black guy who played water polo. Our friendship coalesced slowly, very slowly, from there.