The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (33 page)

Amid all the change and drama surrounding the Class of '02, Rob's life in 2005, in the midpoint of his twenties, was defined by how little things changed. His friends and family were trying to get through one day and then the next, as they always had. The hustlers along Center Street still leaned against the same walls and tried to start the same shit with young children in their school uniforms. Old friends of his father still told the same Skeet stories while leaning out from their front stoops. Sharpe James was still the mayor, though increasingly embattled, with a face weathered by his time in office and a challenge by the young, charismatic, and Yale-educated Cory Booker. Jackie still worked the same schedule at the same nursing home for the same pay. And Rob was still walking into the same building each morning that he'd walked into during high school, passing beneath the sign that read
WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME
.

The primary change Rob had been dealing with since he began teaching had to do with his grandfather Horace. Though he wasn't techni
cally diagnosed, he clearly suffered from dementia, or some comparable waning of the mind. He watched TV most of the time, but if left alone he got antsy. The previous summer, in 2004, he'd left the house, gotten in the car, and driven off as if going out to buy bourbon. Eight fraught hours later, he'd calmly called Jackie from South Carolina, where he'd driven to “visit family,” even though the Peace family didn't have people in South Carolina. Rob had flown down to drive him back. Afterward, Rob did even more than he already was to take the burden of the elder generation off his mother, an effort born of the guilt he felt for the hours she'd worked, the education those hours had given to him. As a boy, he'd compensated by taking care of household chores. As a young man, he'd contributed money from his “campus jobs.” Now, in addition to the same chores and fiscal contributions, he did his best to care for Frances and Horace, whether that meant sitting with them in the living room watching reruns of the sitcom
227
, or shuttling Frances to endless doctor's appointments to treat her emphysema, or telling stories about Rio (censored versions, no doubt). Horace passed away, peacefully, in 2005.

At this time, Rob had a college degree. He owned a car and a house. He traveled as much as he could during breaks from school. He helped his family and friends as capably as his means allowed. In most contexts, he was living a successful life already, and because of who he was, he still had potential for so much more success.

But his time at Yale, in the eyes of those close to him, had altered the meaning of the word “success.” And he needed to make changes, belated though they might be, if he was going to get closer to whatever that word had come to signify in his mind.

Later that summer after the Penn Relays and after Horace had passed, Skeet collapsed in the prison yard. His blood was drawn in the prison medical ward and sent to a state lab for testing. And when the results came back, Skeet found out exactly what had been making him so tired.

Chapter 11

S
TEAMING MOUNDS OF
beef and pork, lathered in oil and sugar, rose above the brims of the platters between us. A large pitcher of sangria was already halfway emptied. On the Friday afternoon before my wedding, I'd taken a break from the manual labor of preparation for the reception, at Rebecca's parents' brownstone, to take the Path train to Newark for lunch with Rob. I'd enlisted him as a groomsman. He hadn't been able to make it to the bachelor party a few weeks earlier, and I was glad about that: the event had been suitably lame. But that Friday, Rob left St. Benedict's during lunch to pick me up at Penn Station and take me to an all-you-can-eat special at Fernandes, in the Ironbound, his favorite
rodízio
restaurant. He went there often and had an established routine: eat, take a cigarette break, drink, cigarette break, eat and drink, cigarette break, eat, cigarette break, drink. He said that not eating and drinking simultaneously allowed the stomach to expand more comfortably and accommodate more food. I had never seen a performance like it. The meal lasted for over two hours.

My family situation had improved: everyone was coming to the wedding, and my parents were throwing the rehearsal dinner that night. But an edginess still surrounded the event, if only because very few people in my orbit seemed to have any faith in this marriage lasting.

I mentioned these tribulations as briefly as possible to Rob during one of the “drink” phases of the meal. In college and after, he'd always seemed to live in a world above the one in which my own various trou
bles existed. Though always willing and capable of giving advice, he did so with a remoteness that colored whatever he said as wise. Today was no different. He said, “People bring their own shit to the way they see things. If they don't believe what you're doing is right, that's their choice. But the choice has more to do with them than with you. Don't worry about it. You made your own choice.”

I'd trekked here this afternoon hoping to be centered by him and his Robness, and he didn't disappoint. Mostly, he told me about Rio and his plans to go back. The wistfulness in his voice was absolute, trumping anything he said about being a teacher, coach, or homeowner.

“I guess, with all the vacation time, it shouldn't be too hard for you to get there,” I said.

He laughed. “That's the thing about it—you get all this time, but there's no dough. Vacation? I spend those weeks working.”

“Working what?” I asked.

He shrugged. “You know. This and that. Whatever I can pick up.”

I had sold my first novel just a few weeks before, for enough of an advance to provide security for roughly a year. People usually reacted to this news in one of three ways: with exaggerated elation, expounding on the achievement (from friends); with a ho-hum, “Oh, that's good news” (from my family, followed by a pessimistic, “So do you have to give that money back if the book doesn't sell well?”); or with low-key compliments veiling competitive contempt (from other writers: “I guess the whole ‘young guy in New York' thing is back in vogue . . .”). Rob's reaction was one I'd never heard before. “Let me know when that comes out; I'll pick up a copy,” he said without surprise or manufactured congratulations, but simply as an extension of the steady confidence he had in the fact that I, or anyone, could accomplish our dreams if we stayed the course long enough. Not sure how Rob would feel about his ex-roommate writing a book about a gay man who sociopathically seduces both halves of a married couple, all of them Manhattan-based Yale alumni, I just shrugged and said, “Will do.”

The following night, an accident on the BQE caused a traffic snarl that plugged every western passageway into Brooklyn; Rob was stuck
in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel during the ceremony but made it to the reception. He brought a date whom he hadn't mentioned the day before, Katrina. She was very beautiful, with short dreadlocks and a sparkly smile. Along with Ty, another track teammate named Phil, and the family who lived next door to my in-laws, they were the only black people there. Hurricane Katrina had just struck New Orleans weeks earlier, and she spent much of the night humoring guests who bombarded her with comments like, “That's an unlucky name these days!” Between pictures, trying to make sure my family were enjoying themselves, toasts, and conversations with eccentric uncles from both sides of the aisle, the night passed quickly. Whenever I did manage to escape, Rob and Katrina were always close by. He remained, as ever, an easy retreat, one with whom there was no pressure to perform. He brought me a lot of drinks, knowing that the path to the bar was fraught for the groom. Ty requested a Ludacris song from the DJ, and we did the “Throw Dem Bows” dance they'd taught me in college, three or four of us alone in the center of the tiny dance floor in the parlor, for a few moments traveling back to simpler times. He and Katrina left quietly, with a pat on my shoulder and a nod. He slipped me an envelope containing a fifty-dollar bill, no note, as a wedding present.

“Gonna go get some ass,” he said. “I'll see you, Da Jeffrey.”

“Soon, right?” I replied.

“Trust,” he said.

I watched them walk up South Portland Avenue, Katrina's forearm slipped through the crook of his elbow, his shoulders hunched, his footsteps heavy beneath the midnight streetlights.

Rebecca and I left for Los Angeles the next day, where we were moving (temporarily, I thought) because of her job working for a small film company.

That was the last time I ever saw my friend.

“W
HAT ARE YOU
doing, man?” This was Big Steve Raymond, Victor's older brother. They were hanging out in Rob's unit on the second floor of his house, barely furnished, still a work in progress. Rob was cutting a half pound of weed into dime bags, fielding calls on his cell phone, pounding coffee as he prepared to head out for a night of deliveries. His hiatus from dealing had lasted for about a year and a half, at which point financial pressures—no doubt arising from home ownership and renovations—had impelled him to resume his old profession, that too-easy equalizer. He'd done this quietly at first, and then less so.

“What you mean?”

“I mean, come on, man, what the fuck? You don't need to be doing this . . .”

Rob laughed gently. “It ain't for shits and giggles.”

Big Steve let the matter drop; he felt almost embarrassed offering his opinions to Rob. Though he was six years older, and he and Victor had survived more than their share of hardship, Rob was still the smart one, the Yale grad. Steve had dropped out of college freshman year, when his parents had passed away, and since then had been working primarily as a night security guard downstate in Browns Mills, New Jersey. He'd never done more than tread water, but not drowning felt like success. He and Victor lived together now; Victor was still working as a salesman for Home Depot, nervous because the FAA, due to the quick burnout of air traffic controllers, rarely hired anyone older than twenty-eight. Steve's chest felt heavy watching Rob dealing drugs again, and dealing on a low level that left him a weary shell most days. Whenever he raised the matter, however, Rob would cut him short with these vague declarations about “doing what I gotta do.”

At Yale, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd grown up in Newark. In Newark, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd gone to Yale.

Oswaldo's advice was the same that, a few years ago, he himself had refused to hear from others: “Get the fuck out of Newark. Get the fuck
away from people who won't get the fuck out of Newark.”

He couched no vitriol in these declarations; Oswaldo just stated the reality of things as he knew them. Three years after graduation had found him working in a taco shop, getting high all the time to metabolize the fact that he was working in a taco shop, recklessly exposing himself to danger—such as the night he and Rob had been smoking in Orange Park, and one of their friends had mouthed off to a couple of Bloods trolling the park; guns had been drawn, and Oswaldo and Rob took shelter with “Auntie,” Victor and Big Steve's aunt, in her nearby apartment. Oswaldo had suffered another nervous breakdown, but unlike in college, there hadn't been a renowned psych ward into which he could comfortably check himself. So he'd driven to New Haven, just to get away, crashing with Anwar and other townie friends. He went to Yale's Career Services and told a counselor there that if they didn't help him figure out what to do, he'd most likely be dead in a year. With guidance, he was admitted to the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania the following fall, 2005. Now he was one year into a graduate degree in psychiatry, and he urged Rob whenever they spoke to follow in his footsteps—frustrated again and again by his friend's ingrained belief that following in anyone's footsteps would somehow betray who he was. Oswaldo thought that was nothing more than a cliché but resigned himself to the fact that getting too involved in such intractable, street-bred personality walls such as Rob's was exactly the kind of thing that had caused his mind to spiral dangerously away twice in his life.

Why wouldn't Rob just listen? Even as Oswaldo intentionally began to disengage, the question nagged him, and in certain moments, studying alone in the library toward his degree, haunted him. Rob should have been studying alone in the library, too—not hanging out with all those friends in the hood.

Which was the answer to his question. Rob wouldn't listen because of his friends, from Oakdale and Mt. Carmel, from football games, from the stoops of East Orange, from St. Benedict's, from his various dealing networks. These people were all grown now. Some, like Shannon Heg
gins, a junior high school girlfriend of Rob's, had children with fathers who'd already split. Some, like Curtis, had decent jobs and were doing just fine. Some, like Flowy, were living more precariously. Some, like Tavarus—who'd just been arrested for possession with intent to distribute, the mark on his record akin to having a 0.7 GPA in high school but much harder to fix—had already fallen below the line. And Rob strived to be the Man among these peers. If someone needed money for rent or for kids' clothes, Rob thumbed it over. If someone's car broke down and he needed a ride, Rob picked him up. If someone was bored and wanted company, Rob rolled through. These efforts went both ways. Once, when Rob's tire blew out at one in the morning on the Merritt Parkway en route to visit Daniella Pierce—still working in New Haven on urban education policy reform as it pertained to ex-felons—he called Flowy, who immediately hopped in his own car to bring him a spare and work the jack (Rob, for all his knowledge, was helpless when it came to cars), an hour's drive each way, with tolls. When he had trouble pulling rent from his tenants on Greenwood Avenue, Drew came by to intimidate a payment out of them. Victor and Big Steve had taken Dio off Jackie's hands when he'd first gone to Rio, and they'd ended up keeping him for three years as the pet had grown from a short stack of coils into a thick, formidable reptile capable of popping the metal lid off his own tank. (Victor ultimately gave Dio to a local pet store owner, who most likely found him too big to sell; I sometimes wonder if the snake was released, and is now still making slow S-curves through the Pine Barrens, prowling for mice and squirrels.)

Friendship, in this community, was simple: it meant being there. Friendship necessitated no pride, no projection of having your shit together if you didn't, no passivity, no judgment—and especially no fronting, which had characterized so many relationships at Yale. Friendship here was the most dependable means by which they were going to get through their various lives. Because of the value Rob placed on relationships, he could reply, “Chill, I'm on it,” whenever Oswaldo hammered on the fact that Rob was better than where he'd grown up, and that a
very big life lay in store for him if he would only take the first steps toward it. Because no longer would that life step toward him the way Charles Cawley had in the St. Benedict's gymnasium.

Oswaldo also understood that Rob fronted more than anyone else Oswaldo had ever known. As in high school, when Rob had veiled his personal hardships with intelligence and leadership, he now veiled them with a generosity that was incredibly costly, in both dollars and emotional drain.

The emotional drain intensified when, on a prison visit in the fall of 2005—not long after my wedding—his father told him that he had cancer in his brain.

R
AQUEL HAD
GRADUATED
from Yale a year behind us, in '03. Simon, her future husband, was still at a prestigious med school in Manhattan studying cardiology, and she moved to the city that summer, just after Lyric Benson's murder. She lived with Simon on the second floor of a building his parents had just bought on 119th Street and First Avenue, in Spanish Harlem. Their home was a run-down unit above a street that not five years prior had been a drug-dealing hot zone (renovations began immediately, and the house was practically gutted around them). She worked for a nonprofit documentary film company and freelanced in the TV industry. Because much of her work involved shooting B-roll film in nightclubs for shows like HBO's
Taxicab Confessions
as well as attending wrap and premiere parties—and also because she'd been using drugs like Ecstasy since she was fourteen—amping up her nightlife seemed like part and parcel of her chosen career. These self-destructive habits were accelerated by a number of factors she couldn't control: Simon's long hours, being responsible by remote for the less self-sufficient members of her extended family in Miami, meeting her father for the first time in a dingy motel room in Little Havana and encountering a stranger who didn't much care for her, and the fact that drug use was common among so many of her friends, from both
childhood and Yale. She carried on, sometimes heading straight from a nightclub to work in the morning. Simon was very straight, very driven, and very loyal. Between twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, he trained seriously in Shaolin kung fu, kendo, and qigong while Raquel's life, increasingly, revolved around partying.