The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (24 page)

We'd left campus around eleven. I'd opted out of the gambling by one. Then three, four, five in the morning passed us by, and Rob played on, chain-smoking cigarettes, drinking rum and Cokes. I nursed White Russians and took a few walks around to people-watch and try the slot machines. An isolated casino in the middle of a weeknight had a weight to it, a desperation beneath the pale lights and chirpy dings of the machines. The few people there seemed to have come down from Boston or up from New York City, and they appeared to have little more to hope for in life than a decent winning streak. Upon returning to the table (my own hope being that Rob might want to leave soon), I paused to watch him from a distance of maybe twenty yards. He looked very much woven into these surreal surroundings. The friend whom I'd come to view as a kind of icon, who for three years had never once given in to the real and manufactured anxieties coursing through the rest of us, now just sat there alone, focused only on the hand in play, seized by the hope that the hand would be good enough. During fleeting moments, between haughty exchanges with the dealer and the table slapping and chip gathering, he could look serious and worn. We left at six in the morning, just in time to beat commuter traffic into New Haven. We drove mostly in silence, with Shaggy singing “It Wasn't Me” on the
worn-out speakers, both of us in that woozy yet strangely sober state of having spent an entire night awake and active.

I smoked with him for the first time that semester, not long after that excursion. He'd offered many times over the years, and I'd demurred offhand, until these exchanges had become a kind of rehearsed joke.

Then one evening during November of senior year, he was rolling a joint. As typically began our back-and-forth, he raised it toward me and said with that grin, “Come on, Jeffrey, it'll chill you
out
,” to which I was expected to say something like “I'm cool” or “No thanks, man.”

“Okay, sure,” I replied.

He blinked his eyes and hollered, “
What
the
fuck
?”

“Sure, I'll try.”

Rob called to Ty, who ran into the common room. They made an event out of what followed, giving me the rite of passage that Rob had never experienced as a kid taking his first toke. The only problem was that I had never smoked anything before and didn't know how; my first attempt left my mouth tasting like ash but didn't reach my lungs.

“Nasty,” I rasped through the dissociative tingle in the back of my throat.

“What about a bong?” Ty suggested.

“A bong would just about kill the kid,” Rob replied, and then, to me, “Come here.”

He made me sit on a stool directly across from him. He put the joint in his mouth and directed me to place my face in front of his, maybe four inches apart. “Now, just breathe in and don't stop,” he said. I complied, and as I did so he pulled fast and deep off the joint and in a gentle, steady exhalation streamed the smoke back over my face. The trick was called “shotgunning,” and it was effective. Immediately my lungs filled to capacity with Rob's breath, laced with THC.

“Now hold it in,” Rob said. “Hold it a minute.”

My track-trained and untainted respiratory system was quite powerful, and I was happy to impress him. I was also instantaneously stoned. I'd expected to feel something like the peace Rob himself exhibited when high. Instead, I just became dizzy and began giggling at every sound I
heard while a low-level paranoia fixed itself to the rear of my brain. A grin locked itself onto my face so tight that my cheeks ached for days. I was passed out not more than thirty minutes later. The next morning, while I dug at my dried-out eyes, Rob slapped me on the back and said, “You were funny as hell last night.”

“Do I owe you any money?” I asked.

“For, like, two half hits?” He laughed. “Nah, it's on the house.” (His tone implied that this would be the last freebie.)

“I guess I thought it would be more mellow or something,” I replied.

“It's like your running. You just gotta train and you'll get there.”

My running, which had consumed every afternoon and the bulk of my weekends throughout college, had gotten me little more than a recurring hamstring pull that had long since nullified all my lofty hopes for record setting. The injury had also made me something of a basket case, logging each nutrient that went into my body, obsessing about sleep, living in terror of “speed-endurance” practices, and overthinking races to the point where my muscles would tighten and the bad hamstring would twinge and my mind, rather than focus on the rather simple task of running forward as fast as possible, would collapse into uncertainty as my opponents ran on ahead. These stresses accounted for probably half of my waking thoughts for three years of my life. So, though my first pot experience was more or less pathetic and I wasn't impelled to retry anytime soon, loosening up a bit felt like a positive thing to do. More positive still was the experience of sharing this small, vital aspect of my friend's life.

After a time, we all seemed to calm down and focus once again—­particularly the premed students staring down the barrel of the MCAT. In many ways, this test was the culmination of all the studying, lab work, and anxiety that had accompanied their chosen career path: five hours that would decide what caliber of medical schools would consider them. These students disappeared for days at a time to study, take Kaplan courses and practice tests, and seek out any datum of information that might give them an advantage over the thousands of future doctors with
whom they would be competing that day. These students resembled parents of infant triplets: bleary-eyed, beaten down, weakly managing to put a positive spin on the undertaking. Ty would score 44 out of a possible 45, placing him in the hundredth percentile nationally.

Even the science majors who were not planning on medical school tended to take the exam in order to at least retain the option, but Rob did not. When asked about what he wanted to do with his degree, he would change the subject to Rio. He didn't plan this trip so much as dream of it; he seemed to believe he could simply board a plane, bank over the ocean and land among those hills, then wing it from there. I wondered about his seeming lack of post-Yale motivation, and yet his “chillness” aligned so naturally with who he was that I never questioned it, and certainly not aloud to him. “Rob will figure it out,” those of us who knew him would say to each other. “He always does.” None of us—not even Oswaldo Gutierrez—knew then what we know now: that he had netted just over $100,000 selling marijuana at Yale. A small portion of this he'd already given to his mother in installments akin to the money he'd once left on the counter, small enough that she didn't question him when he told her it came from the dining hall job he'd quit long before. He'd spent $10,000 or so on school supplies and summer travel. He set aside another $30,000, also for his mother, that he could give to her when he had a real job and wouldn't have to bend believability to explain where it came from. The remaining half, “fifty large” in Rob's parlance, was to pay for Rio and float him through the next year, at which point he was confident that he would in fact “figure it out.”

I
'M STILL NOT
sure why, but my entire academic curriculum senior year revolved around the literary “search for the father” motif. In a prestigious class taught by the literature scholar Harold Bloom, I wrote my final paper on Odysseus and Telemachus, arguing that while the son searched for the father, the father was really searching for himself. (Professor Bloom gave the paper a C-, with a single comment
scrawled on page 1: “This isn't Homer, it's Hobbs!”) My senior thesis on James Joyce's
Ulysses
triangulated Stephen Dedalus, his biological father, Simon Dedalus, and his surrogate father, Leopold Bloom, in an attempt to parse through the symbolic importance of blood. My final project in the creative writing tie-in to my English major was a novel, written quickly and quite poorly, about a carpenter in northern New England who, in the wake of his son's death, sets off to locate the father who abandoned him, encountering thinly veiled characters plucked from the
Odyssey
along the way. None of these projects was original in the slightest, and indeed the subjects had been explored more deftly by innumerable writers before me (meaning: my work was entirely derivative). Combined, they probably totaled 150,000 words, and on these words I worked hours each night, usually with Homer or Joyce or both open beside me.

“How do you just sit there and write shit?” Rob asked. A popular new Nelly CD was playing. Rob's musical tastes seemed to have softened over time, and in the room I'd been hearing fewer freestyle-based, full-throttle gangster rappers like Ludacris and more melodic, overproduced songs like the one we were hearing now, “Ride Wit Me.”

“I don't know,” I replied. “I just like words, and kind of figuring them out.”

Rob knew that I aspired to be a novelist. And without having read any of the lousy short fiction I'd produced over the years, and without telling me as much, he had confidence that I'd be able to do it, certainly more confidence than any jowly, prattling English professor or jaded, overcompetitive creative writing student. The ugliness of the creative writing track evidenced itself in everything from the sample stories you had to submit for entry into the most notable authors' classes to the way every one of those professors smugly advised us during the first class to “choose a different career” and the shared understanding that if you could not speak fluidly at length about Raymond Carver's canon, then you would never succeed. On a fellowship application, under a “career plan” entry, I'd written, “Write books of a mythical nature.” The selec
tion committee had practically laughed me out of the room.

Rob's confidence was communicated with a simple look that said,
If you want to, and you don't, then that's on you.

“How the hell can you memorize every fact in every textbook?” I asked him in reply.

“Not about memorization,” he said and looked up thoughtfully. “It's like, you look at that stereo, or a clock, or whatever, and you would want to write a paragraph describing it. Me, I look at things and want to
figure it out.
Like, take it apart, see what's inside it, know how it works, learn the science behind it.”

“You're like that with people, too,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You're really curious about people's stories. Like you're always trying to ‘figure everyone out.'”

“I suppose,” he replied.

Later in the same conversation, he asked me why I was so obsessed with the
Odyssey.
He'd read it in high school and knew the story and themes, but he'd found the text stiff and inaccessible.

“Just all the father-son stuff,” I replied. “I think about that all the time.”

“How come?”

“I guess it comes from stuff with my own dad.”

“He seems like a real cool pop.”

While struggling to find a way to explain the grievances I had over my father (unfounded, self-gratifying grievances to be sure, being as my father was steady, generous, and devoted to his children almost beyond reason), I remembered where Rob's own father was. Skeet was mentioned so rarely in our room—maybe three times over four years—that forgetting was easy, and remembering made my search for words all the more treacherous.

“He just doesn't show or say much about what he feels. He's kind of internalized. And I care more about what he thinks of me than pretty much anyone else. So, y'know, it's something that's on my mind a lot.”

“Yeah, I see that,” he said, situating his textbook in his lap and pointing his face toward it again.

“Do you think about . . . that stuff?” I said. “With your dad? I mean, I know it's a lot different, but . . . ?” Immediately, I regretted these words.

“I guess,” he replied. “I don't really know the man, so it's different. Mostly, I think about my ma . . .” The conversation tapered off.

Spring term brought with it a flighty, giddy feeling. Final exams still had to be dealt with—but we were
here
, we had
made it.
Now all those “lasts” were truly occurring: last snowfall, last “P is for the P in Pierson College” chants, last Spring Fling concert on Old Campus. Ty and I realized that, although Rob usually came to our home track meets, we had never seen him play water polo. He had been voted captain by his teammates both junior and senior years—a rarity on any sports team—but our knowledge of his sport remained limited to the team photo we found laying haphazardly on the coffee table one afternoon. In the picture, he stood left of center with his chest puffed out in a line of otherwise pale bodies, his face set to convey toughness.

We drove to a tournament at Middlebury College one early Sunday morning, both of us hungover from the previous night. We wandered around the pretty campus until someone was able to direct us toward the pool. We joked about the skimpy swimsuits and rubber helmets for a minute, then half slept through a game before Yale played. Seeing Rob in the water brought us out of this stupor. We were so used to him being subdued and removed—so used to him being stoned, in fact—that to see the energy he possessed in the pool reminded me of a predatory animal, like his python, Dio, once a mouse was dropped into the tank. Our eyes were locked on him, waiting to see what he would do. He did not possess the languid, long-limbed aquatic grace of Olympic swimmers; his strokes were short, choppy, inefficient. But he
moved
, and when he took the ball he placed it bobbing in the water between his arms, controlling it with his chest and head as he swam the length of the pool. When preparing for a shot, his kicking legs held half his torso out of the water, the ball cradled in his palm still higher above his head and making rapid half rotations back and forth as he sought the right angle. We could
hear the smack talk ten rows up in the bleachers:
“Nah! Nah! You ain't got shit!”
when he was defending a ball holder;
“Here it comes, bitch!”
when he was keen to score. He released these gems in a low yet resounding hiss, his teeth bared, his grin scary. That he was the only black player, from what we could tell, in the whole eight-team tournament only heightened the thrashing quality to every movement he made, every word he used to intimidate. He played with his elbows bent and often deployed toward a forehead or jaw. When he was whistled for a foul—which was often—he'd raise his arms out of the water in mystification, like a petulant NBA player. From above, Ty and I egged him on, fully absorbed in his joy, which was total.