The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (21 page)

Then they stopped. The two newcomers put their hands on my combatant's shoulders and pulled him away, and they headed off while he gave me the finger and slurred a few profanities. Thinking my firm countenance had something to do with their retreat, I puffed out my chest, feeling quite the badass. Then I heard Rob behind me: “Damn, son, didn't know you had it in you!” From the balcony a few moments before, he'd seen the initial altercation and hurried down. All he'd had to do was stand behind me, feet set and fists clenched and with what I imagine now to be a taut grin on his face, to send the crew guys packing. He helped me close the door; the incoming stream ceased upon his appearance.

“Thanks,” I said, pain beginning to settle in the kidney area.

“You know I got your back,” he replied. The following week, the flutist who'd recruited me left a fruit basket for my efforts.

The second time Rob saved me had to do with a girl. She was a freshman on the track team; her father had in fact run track with mine at Yale in the late '60s, and so my mom had prompted me to check in on her during the first week of school. I remembered her vaguely from track team reunions when we'd been children and was surprised to find that she was very beautiful. We saw each other at the track every day, went to a lot of the same parties—she was half black and so could hang out with both demographics—drunk-kissed one night, and began dating. I felt very much in love and so fell into the pattern I'd once smirked at in which I tried to pretend that we were married, or at least engaged. This behavior carried on blissfully (I thought) through the first
semester: weekend trips to Manhattan to stroll hand in hand through Central Park, clothes left in one another's bureaus, sweet “I love you”s whispered across the pillow while listening to Sade ballads in her bed at night. Then in January, after a friend told her, “Jeff Hobbs, he's like
marriage material
,” she quickly dumped me—divorced me, I felt, as I fell into a pathetic spiral of self-pity. The breakup was the hardest thing I'd ever experienced in my life, the saddest and most all-consuming.

Rob hadn't seemed to think much of it; maybe he'd made a “Fuck dem hos” comment here and there to “get my head right.” Then, a few long weeks later, he'd found me at two o'clock on a Saturday night in our common room, having just composed a long, driveling email to her with which I was quite satisfied:
What we had was so special . . . you'll never find another guy as good as me . . . blah blah blah.
Rob looked over my shoulder and understood the gravity of the situation, in terms not so much of my feelings but of my dignity, which at the moment was nonexistent. Before I could hit Send (my finger reaching for the button, convinced this bunk would bring her hurrying back that very night), he physically pulled my chair away from the desk. “Nah, nah, nah,” he said sternly. “You want to share your feelings with someone? Share them with me.”

And I did. For forty-five minutes, I outlined the complex (I thought, again) feelings churning within me, waxing on about the family I wanted to have with this girl, the nice home we'd have in Chatham, New Jersey, where she'd grown up—Chatham being one of the posh commuter towns ten minutes west of East Orange—and the three children we'd raise who would all run track for Yale, and this entire idealized future I'd constructed in my head. He indulged me with patience, sincerity, sans laughter, despite the urge he must have felt to laugh. I asked him if he knew what it was like to have a woman you loved inhabit every single one of your waking thoughts, and most of your dreams. “Yeah,” he replied soberly. “I do.”

He kept nodding with appropriate sympathy, even as he informed me that I was acting like a girl in every way. Then he said, “Jeff, you're
a good dude, too good to be bothering with this bullshit.” I nodded glumly. “I'm gonna fix you up with someone, someone fine. Stay tuned.”

He did, and that helped, and I slowly recovered from what had seemed at the time to be a cataclysmic, irreparable heartbreak. (Epilogue: I did end up hitting the Send button after Rob went to bed, and needless to say the email did not accomplish what it had been designed to. When Rob learned this, he fell onto the couch and laughed his ass off.)

M
OLECULAR BIOPHYSICS
and biochemistry was not for the faint of heart. Embedded within an expanse of various sciences—chemistry, geology, engineering, astrophysics, etc.—MB&B garnered, on average, twenty-five students per class out of five hundred to six hundred total science majors. For premeds, the most common major was intercellular, molecular, and developmental biology (IMDB), which was basically an elevated extension of high school biology. For those planning on medical school, a primary goal of these classes was to get good grades, good MCAT scores, and acceptances to good med schools. Students and advisers designed curricula around these ends, and so most students steered far clear of MB&B and its many dizzying prerequisites: advanced calculus, theoretical physics, physical chemistry (commonly known to be the hardest course of all the Yale sciences), as well as each of the core classes that the IMDB majors took. Those who majored in MB&B were either smart and confident enough to know they would get A's anyway, or sufficiently interested in the subject not to worry about their GPAs. Rob was both. His classmates at Yale, as his classmates had at St. Benedict's, knew him as a guy who would sit in the back of class, often looking stoned or simply bored, taking notes but rarely speaking. Then, when the time came to take a test or give an individual presentation, he would “kill it,” making the others wonder what they were doing wrong.

Because of its immense difficulty, MB&B was in some ways free of the hypercompetitiveness that prevailed in the various premed tracks. I'd gotten a small dose of this freshman year when I took intro biol
ogy. From English classes, I was already well accustomed to students talking tediously regarding their keen insights into
The Canterbury Tales
or Pope's
The Rape of the Lock
, leaning back with legs crossed and eyes pointed upward as if divining their words from on high. But I'd never before experienced the thickly layered pressure of a Yale science lecture hall, during which a few hundred students craned forward while writing every word uttered by the professor, sometimes recording on MP3 players as well. The atmosphere was stifling, more uncomfortable than the chairs in the lecture hall, which themselves were particularly narrow and lacking legroom in order to accommodate the masses. You could almost sense a shortage of oxygen in the air, as well as a collective constriction of the lungs consuming that oxygen. These students felt that their futures were at stake in each class and each test, and one missed word, one minute less spent drilling the textbook pages, could mean the difference between Harvard Medical School and someplace lesser, like, say, Vanderbilt. (As a result of this experience, the only other science class I took to fulfill graduation requirements was Geology 101, otherwise known as “Rocks for Jocks.”)

Rob didn't give any ground to the anxiety coursing through the students around him. He simply went to class, did his work, got A's. That he did so while smoking (and dealing) copious amounts of marijuana only made him more of a marvel; he wasn't just smart, he was
cool.
Rob would have said that the weed and the grades were directly related, because being high helped him study free from the nervousness that racked his peers. He chose the MB&B track mainly out of curiosity; he wanted to know how things worked, and MB&B spanned everything from the most intricate proteins within the human body to the workings of the cosmos over billions of years (think Stephen Jay Gould and Stephen Hawking designing a college major together). The choice of major spoke to what Rob had put last on his high school yearbook list of favorites: “knowledge.” He liked to say, almost dreamily, that there were more chemical interactions taking place in the human body each second than there were stars in the universe.

He and Oswaldo started a small study group together, more or less a science club. Once a week, as Rob had done with the Burger Boyz in high school, he, Oswaldo, and a few others gathered to talk about science. Unlike in high school, his task here was not to catch his friends up but rather to immerse himself in what interested them and to discuss the long-term applications of their schoolwork, whether it was med school or a PhD or working in a lab. They talked about the financial repercussions of each option—particularly vital to Rob and Oswaldo, both of whom carried with them the expectation of providing immediately for their families upon graduation. Med school had the biggest long-term upside, but the amount of debt one had to take on in the short term—mid–six figures for a top school—was intimidating. A PhD program led to a teaching career, but that meant living in the petty, racially complicated world of academia forever. Lab work was perhaps the most intellectually fulfilling, but options were limited, as was the prospect of making any real money. Because they were just sophomores when they started the group, the life talk could remain cozily abstract; they still had plenty of time to figure it all out. Mostly, they reveled in having a safe environment in which to fully celebrate their nerd-dom, which for all their lives—on the streets of Newark certainly, but also in unexpected ways at Yale—they'd been compelled to camouflage. As word of the study group leaked and more students began trying to join, kids Rob didn't know as well, he began to disengage from it. Early junior year, he stopped coming altogether.

At the same time, he began working in a lab at Yale Medical School headed by a famed molecular chemistry professor, performing research under the guidance of two PhD students. He began as a lab assistant: sterilizing beakers, recording data, getting coffee. Because of his disciplined promptness and curiosity, he quickly graduated to running his own low-level experiments, primarily in crystal diffraction. His work mostly involved trial and error, and he failed more often than he succeeded in achieving the desired results. His experiments dealt in the scope of atoms; one too many or one too few, and the reactions fell
apart. But unlike most other realms of his life, in a lab with sufficient funding he could always go back to the beginning and try again, which he did with a determination that had the graduate students above him fearing for their jobs.

Social life, academics, lab work—the days and weeks and months and, ultimately, the years passed with an increasing fluidity. Whether he identified with his chosen university or not, the truth was that Rob Peace was a Yalie, and he seemed to grow more comfortable with his status as such. At points along the way, we sometimes wondered how much money he was actually making selling weed. Hundreds of dollars a month? Thousands? More, maybe? We couldn't keep track of the customer traffic coming in and out. We did know that Yale students would pay whatever he asked, no haggling. We knew that every other weekend he would make a trip to Newark, sometimes just for the day, and return with two gallon-size ziplocks of pot in his backpack to carry him through until the next re-up. (He was always in a good mood upon his return, as if nourished.) We knew that each night he spent fifteen minutes or so with his ledger and, as he'd done with menial jobs during childhood, kept careful track of money he'd made, money he expected to make, money he needed to outlay. We knew that he'd quit his dining hall job and worked in the lab for free. We knew that he sold pot to townies, grad students, and even professors in addition to classmates. We knew that his business seemed to steadily ratchet upward from month to month, and that this was the main reason he lobbied us to move into an apartment junior year, a two-bedroom still paid for in tuition as university housing but located in an apartment building across the street from Pierson College proper, outside the gates and so technically “off campus.” What we didn't know, we didn't ask and instead made assumptions: he must be sending money home to his mother, he was saving for graduate school, he kept everything on the DL, or “down low,” he knew exactly what he was doing.

Oswaldo felt differently, and he didn't keep his opinions from Rob the way most everyone else did. Unlike many of our classmates who
bought from him, Oswaldo didn't see anything “cool” or “thug” about dealing drugs. Dealing, to him—and as it had been to Rob's father—was a practical matter of economics, of calculating and compensating for shortfalls. As such, you had to be smart. And a smart dealer didn't work out of his Yale dorm room. He didn't carry ziplocks of weed in his backpack across campus. He didn't prop the entryway door open with a phone book so that he wouldn't have to get off his lazy ass to let customers in. Oswaldo had been dealing, too—after his cartel-associated uncle was put in prison, his assets were frozen and thus unavailable for tuition payments. But Oswaldo was quiet about it. He worked off campus and in small quantities, just enough to help out. He also maintained a work-study job in the library. Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer.

“I've never met anyone so smart but so fucking dumb,” he told Rob.

Rob just shrugged, laughed, and replied, “Don't worry about me.”

Less skeptical were Victor, Tavarus, and Flowy, each of whom visited a number of times. Victor came the most often, busing down from Daniel Webster two or three times a year. His older brother, Big Steve (when he got up from the couch, the springs failed to rise with him), would come up from New Jersey. They seemed like smart guys, kind, easygoing, and nonconfrontational. They did not fit the mold of the stock characters I imagined him hanging out with on his Newark trips (where I envisioned the re-up transactions occurring on dark, barren sidewalks in the middle of the night). They were always smiling and laughing, usually over a blunt and a 1.5-liter bottle of E&J. They carried no cynicism or condescension regarding Yale; they seemed, above all, proud of their friend for being here. They would listen to music in the room with little interest in recruiting girls to join, always inclusive of me and Ty. (Dan left our quad after sophomore year; considering that he lived physically in the bedroom where Rob kept his stock and entertained his friends, I didn't blame him.) Rob told them that I had
“pull” with girls—an utter lie that I gladly played along with. Their visits were just like any visits between high school friends on a college campus: booze, weed, empty pizza boxes littering the floor beneath bodies passed out on the couch. Big Steve typically vomited at some point, and because of his immense size it could be difficult for him to make it to the bathroom in time. The pizza boxes, it turned out, did not make for adequate receptacles.