The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (23 page)

Initiation was protracted over three weeks in the spring. The specifics varied from society to society, but they typically involved seniors wearing masks and dark robes walking across campus like so many Grim Reapers to perform minor hazing rituals that took place in various chapels, with an almost celebratory emphasis on the cultishness of it all. Like learning the school songs at St. Benedict's, Rob had to memorize verses written on papyrus scrolls that detailed the history of Elihu, the school's third-oldest secret society. He had no trouble doing this, mumbling the words with an exaggerated detachment from the proceedings, a contrast to peers who did the same thing with trembling, anxious, humbled whispers. Then came Tap Night, when the campus erupted with a few hundred inebriated students assigned tasks for the night: breaking into
classroom buildings to steal chairs, climbing campus monuments to sing songs in their underwear, etc. Rob was asked to lie on his stomach in front of the library and challenge any passing campus police to an arm-wrestling match.

“Nah,” he said. He'd grown up in a neighborhood in which policemen were constantly checking him out, and in which policemen, in his eyes, had set up his father for life in prison. “You can't get me to do that.” In the end, they couldn't.

The following week, he and the eleven other new members of Elihu were invited to the society-owned property, a Federal-style house on the New Haven Green, to drink and receive their pins, with hoods and masks removed. Every Thursday and Sunday night throughout senior year, this group would meet here for a few hours, the goal to open up fully to people who otherwise would have remained merely acquaintances or strangers—to actualize, in a way, the Yale experience in which so many different people of so many different backgrounds were “tapped” to live in these cordoned-off city blocks together. Rob seemed more interested in the fact that he would now have access to the house, which through generous alumni contributions had its own housekeeping service and was kept fully stocked with high-end food and booze year-round. The newly tapped members each owed $100 to the treasurer, Laurel Bachner, a Manhattanite from the Upper East Side and a Dalton School alum. Rob's check bounced initially, and he seemed to forget about it after that. She was nervous about confronting him; an inherent discomfort existed between a rich white girl approaching a poor black man regarding money he owed. She'd never known anyone in her life who couldn't keep $100 in the bank. He'd already made a few cracks about her spoiled upbringing, and she was prepared to cover his dues herself to spare them both the confrontation. Just before she did so, Rob stopped her on campus and slipped her the money in cash. “Sorry about that,” he said. “The bank changed my account number for some reason. That was why the check bounced.”

The Elihu retreat at the end of that year took place at the New York Governor's Mansion in Albany; a senior member of Elihu was the gov
ernor's daughter. Oswaldo, recently out of the psychiatric ward and doing his best to catch up on his classes before year's end, still took a moment to pull Rob aside. “Don't be a fool,” was his advice, meaning: don't bring a bunch of weed, don't drink too much, and in general don't get all messed up. Rob was going to the
Governor's Mansion
, and Oswaldo felt that he needed to treat the experience with respect. Rob was representing their kind of people, and if he “got stupid,” he would only be reinforcing stereotypes. In the wake of his breakdown, Oswaldo had become hyperattuned to the way he, and people like him, were perceived. For his first three years at Yale, he'd been frustrated by these perceptions, feeling that they were inescapable, allowing that caged feeling to overwhelm him. The perspective granted him by two weeks of near total isolation had led him to believe that he—and in a much bigger way, Rob—had only propagated the ignorance of their peers. Because they
did
get stoned all the time, they
did
get angry, they
did
dress like thugs, they
did
talk shit about a college education that might set them up for fulfilling lives, they
did
set themselves apart. For Oswaldo, the issue had ceased to be a philosophical and historical one, and instead had come to revolve around a simple goal: to graduate from Yale without making that task harder than it needed to be. After all, that was the point of college—not freedom, not alcohol, not relationships, but to
obtain a degree.

After sitting in FDR's wheelchair that was on display in the museum sector of the Governor's Mansion, Rob ended up doing all three of the things that Oswaldo had warned him against, and Saturday night of the retreat found him passed out on the pool table, an empty bottle of the governor's whiskey clutched in his hand. With that, his initiation into the secret society, perhaps the most rarefied and exclusive component of Yale, was complete.

M
Y HEAD WAS WEDGED
between the tubular metal arm of our futon frame and the windowsill of a second-floor stair landing.

“
Pull
,” I grunted, “don't push.
OW!
”

“Sorry, my bad.” Rob laughed, and then the pressure eased off my skull.

We were moving into the dorm again, early September of senior year. For what would be the last time, we were rummaging through the basement storage rooms for our scuffed and dented furniture, hauling each item up the shoulder-width basement stairs and then angling it around the landings, smashing our fingers and torquing our elbows and laughing throughout. We were in the grip of a too-conscious awareness that everything was suddenly a “last.” The last New Haven fall with leaves all afire, the last coed intramural football games, the last tailgates, the last naked parties (one Yale staple in which Rob did not take part), the last time we would all be catching up on our summers, which at this point many had spent in internships related to their chosen career paths. Beginning with the transport of furniture, we began to embrace these “bright college years” with an energy that hadn't existed before the light at the end of the tunnel began flashing so closely, beckoning us while at the same time warning us to turn back.

We'd been back in school for a little over a week when the Twin Towers fell. I was buying toothpaste at a CVS up Whalley Avenue when I heard the urgent newscast over the radio behind the cashier, not totally following what was happening. A half hour later, in the dining hall for lunch, some students were crying. Others were shaking their heads, bewildered. Still others were already intellectualizing the event. Another fifteen minutes passed before someone actually told me that the World Trade Center had been reduced to rubble, and the Pentagon had also been hit. The master walked solemnly from table to table, asking students if their families were all safe. My two older siblings lived in Manhattan now, and my parents happened to be in the city while my dad attended a surgical conference. Phones were down but I was able to email my brother in his SoHo office, where his window had given him a clear view of the bodies plummeting from the upper floors. Between the first and second towers falling, my dad had volunteered to board a
bus filled with doctors from the conference, heading toward the site to set up a triage center. We didn't learn until the evening that the bus had been rerouted to Chelsea Piers, but that very few patients came in due to the severe nature of the event: the majority of affected people were either psychologically traumatized but physically unharmed, or else dead. There wasn't much in between.

Ty, Rob, and I gathered in our half-assembled room to watch the news, the endless replay of the second building turning to smoke. Ty kept talking animatedly about the goddamn terrorists, how we should kill them all. At one point a plane flew low overhead, its engine reverberating through the dorm, and Ty's girlfriend screamed mortally and tried to climb under the futon. Rob sat forward, elbows on knees and hands clasped between them. He said very little that I can remember. Then he stood and we went together to the candlelight vigil held in front of the library, during which the president of the Arab Society gave a powerful speech. Afterward, Rob went off alone, I assumed to the Weed Shack or Oswaldo's or somewhere comfortable for him to speak his mind about the day's events, or maybe just to study, which was what I did.

He went to Anwar Reed's house. Anwar was a “townie.” He'd grown up in New Haven and now lived with two pit bulls three miles east on State Street, one of those downtrodden regions of New Haven that students avoided. Anwar hustled; that was how he and Rob had met. He was also quiet and kind, low-key, and never made fun of Rob's association with Yale, whose ornate structures had always towered in distant but clear view, seeming to mark the capital of a foreign country. Anwar was planning to join the army, and Rob went there to talk about the day's heavy consequences on Anwar's future.

Unbeknownst to me, from the beginning of freshman year Rob and Oswaldo had been drawn away from Yale via their friends on the dining hall and custodial staffs, outward into the city of New Haven. Rob considered these excursions a much-needed dose of reality, the social equivalent of an antidepressant. Anwar's yard had a view of East Rock, particularly striking at sunset when the last rays enriched the limestone
frontage. He hosted a lot of barbeques in that yard, where the grill was sandwiched between a stack of cracked flat tires and a rusty wheelless wheelbarrow. Inside the small house, a threadbare beige couch and a mattress in the bedroom were the only furnishings. Ash stains branded the hardwood floor. The pit bulls curled up together in their cage in the corner. Anwar had steered some business Rob's way over the years—“making movements,” he called it, like Skeet and Carl had—and whenever he did so Rob had slipped him 20 percent of what he'd made. “Kickback,” Rob would say.

The look and feel of places like Anwar's, the cadence of the language spoken, the familiar topics of conversation—these elements combined to make Rob and Oswaldo feel like they hadn't, in fact, forsaken their roots. Jacinta, in their dining hall chats, constantly warned him to be careful. “You can say things to kids here and it doesn't matter, they won't mess with you. With that boy Anwar and all them, you have to watch what you say, protect yourself. It's not the same.”

“Always,” Rob would reply, eating at his usual spot behind her card-swiping station.

After 9/11, Rob could no longer carry a backpack of marijuana through the upgraded security of Penn Station and Grand Central. He bought a car, a low-riding, decades-old, two-door Toyota on its last legs. I couldn't imagine the vehicle having cost more than a few hundred dollars. He felt that the engine had just enough juice left to get him down to Newark and back a few times, sufficient to see him through the year. Whenever he had trouble with it, which was often, he took the car to Flowy. In the years since high school, Flowy had fashioned himself into an expert diagnostician of car engines.

Though the subject came up weightily in most of our classes, the real-world consequences of the World Trade Center remained largely unknown to us (as, in retrospect, they did to the highest levels of government). But the tragedy brought forward, with an unusual gravity, the transition we were on the verge of making. What had happened had happened in the real world. The attack had immediately, savagely altered the lives of real people, people who went to work every day,
owned houses, had families, and geared their lives around something other than “expanding their minds to actualize their best selves,” as Yale president Richard Levin had advised us to do at our convocation ceremony three years before. Not every Yale student came from a sheltered background, but we were all undeniably sheltered here. No matter how important an English paper or a math exam or a football game felt, the realization emerged that none of these activities with which we filled our schedules truly mattered, that soon we would leave this place with whatever GPA and other achievements we had managed to obtain, and reality awaited. Gone from our lives would be the snowball fights on quads, the food prepared daily for us, the keg stands at Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and course loads designed such that there would be no classes before noon. Very soon, our decisions would have consequences, our lives would include danger, we would experience sadness and loss and disappointment on a scale heretofore unknown. With the weight and moment of 9/11 still coursing through the culture, we felt unprepared.

We hid these fears the most effective way we knew how—by returning to the idiotic behavior that had marked our first weeks on campus. Rob was not above taking part. His stoner circle widened and gathered more frequently, sometimes lasting clear through a weeknight during which no studying was done. The car gave him more flexibility to go to Anwar's house, and sometimes on a whim to Mohegan Sun, an Indian casino an hour north. I tagged along once, and sat rigidly in the passenger seat as he drove that beater car through the densely wooded freeways of central Connecticut, pushing seventy, Outkast blaring. I'd never been to a casino, and after he gave me a two-minute tutorial on how to play craps and blackjack, I proceeded to lose $80 with alacrity and ease, at which point I removed myself from the table to observe. Rob called me a bitch, as he'd called me many times before, with affection. And I was perfectly content to spend most of the night watching him play hand after hand of blackjack and sink himself deep. His low-hanging smile belied the studiousness with which he played, contemplative about every one of his hits and splits, and more so with each $15 hand he lost.
He kept throwing money on the table, always with a smile and a loose flick of the wrist. But the fingers of his left hand danced along his chips incessantly; I knew he was keeping track of every dollar in the ledger in his head. He maintained an easy dialogue with the dealer. “You had to go and give yourself an eight,” he said, slapping his palm on the table after a twenty-one on the dealer's side. “Didn't you?
Didn't
you? Now why you gotta do me like that?” She was a middle-aged Asian woman, accustomed to indulging the clientele in a professional way that preserved the invisible rampart between them. Over the course of her shift at his table, Rob drew her in to the point where that barrier dissolved, and she was clearly rooting for him, almost ashamed when she drew a blackjack, beaming when Rob doubled down and won. Whenever the dealers changed, Rob gave the departing a warm goodbye and immediately began charming the next.