The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (44 page)

Now he had a boss. Whether he was driving Christopher home from school or watching TV with his grandmother or at a bar listening to a friend DJ, when the call came from Amin, he had to figure out how to be there. Whatever the conversion deadline was, he had to meet it or there would be consequences, typically financial but always carrying the latent menace of something more. He pulled all-nighters in the base
ment on Smith Street, sometimes two or three in a row, something he'd never had to do in college. This work was fundamentally more dangerous than anything else he'd ever done.

The underworld of drugs, even drugs as relatively benign as marijuana, existed in a complicated hierarchy that paralleled the socioeconomic gradations of the American class system. There were the very small number of individuals at the top who controlled commerce, men like the one Oswaldo had grown up having family dinners with. While extremely dangerous in the power they wielded, these men worked from a calculated distance, like Wall Street titans. They were rarely seen. Their actual workplace dynamics were mysterious. They neither cared much about nor dealt directly with the vast number of people working on the bottom, where Rob had always comfortably resided. These people—the lower class, so to speak—were mostly teenagers, sometimes children, sometimes young adults. They sold drugs on street corners and worked as mules. For a tiny fraction of the overall proceeds—often less than minimum wage, when hours and pay were calculated—these low-level cogs in the machine were the most exposed, and so they carried the bulk of the risk. They, too, were dangerous, particularly the ambitious sorts who desired to make a career of this work. Beefs over territory, women, words, and money—always money—had the capacity to escalate, and indeed that brand of conflict accounted for roughly 20 percent of the violent crime in Newark, a statistic that has remained stable for three decades. Rob had always been able to steer clear of the danger they represented, as Jackie and her family had steered clear of the project towers during their youth. He conducted most of his commerce among friends and friends of friends. His “connects” had always been independent, known quantities without gang ties. He'd made sure that, when necessary, local dealers had been aware of his presence and his methods so that rumors wouldn't work their way up the chain of command to those who actually posed a true threat.

These were the dealers in the middle, a vast and amorphous group of suppliers, creditors, lieutenants, and the like who, in the organized rackets, gave commands to the lower class while taking orders from on high. They were the blood and the muscle of this world. They were the enforcers. They controlled the territory and solved the problems. They had the most to gain and the most to lose. In this uncertain arena, Rob now worked as a kind of chemist on retainer for Amin's corporation—a corporation from which quitting was not as simple as walking away. Rob hated his involvement as much as he relied on it for the short-term future.

“Just be careful,” Flowy told him. “You don't want to be in deep, and he's gonna want you in deep, and he's not gonna want to let you loose when that time comes.”

“I'm cool with him,” Rob replied. “He knows where I'm at.”

Rob was confident that because Amin liked and respected him, extricating himself from the operation wouldn't be difficult once he landed a job and went back to school.

He was hoping to lump these two eventualities—job and school—­together by applying to a Leadership Development Program at Johnson & Johnson. He was revising the personal statement he'd sent Isabella for the application to this program. If Rob was accepted, he would start at the company as a bench worker—mixing simple chemicals and taking care of lab equipment, which was his first role in the lab at Yale—while concurrently earning a graduate degree at NYU, with the tuition paid for by Johnson & Johnson in return for a long-term contract. He was confident that he would be accepted to the program. He just had to get by until the following September, when the recruitment started, and he was constantly on the lookout for some alternative, viable means that didn't involve working for Amin.

That alternative came through Curtis in early March 2011, just as spring was beginning to penetrate the long, cold winter. The prospect he put forward was ambitious, labor-intensive, and perilous. It also had the potential to solve all of Rob's problems.

Chapter 15

T
HIS WILL BE OUR
gray area,” Rob said. Flowy, Drew, Tavarus, and Curtis were listening. Three burned-down joints were neatly balanced on the lip of an ashtray, beside the liter of one-hundred-proof Smirnoff nearing its dregs. “There's no great man who doesn't have one, no man who's ever made a difference, anyway. You don't get to the top without compromising something along the way. Jay-Z, Biggie, Tupac—they all hustled early on. Look at politics and presidents: real estate scams, bribes, women. LBJ stuffed a ballot box back in the early days. Kennedy gave syphilis to any girl who came his way. Clinton was a draft dodger among other things. Cory Booker, Obama even—you know they did shady shit to get where they're at.”

“Your point?” Drew asked.

“My point is, this right here will be ours. This will be our gray area.”

Curtis's eyes brightened. For the last few hours of heavy talk, he'd been waiting for Rob to say something like this: analytical but philosophically resonant enough to bring the group toward an elusive unanimous decision on the matter at hand, still standing at Rob, Curtis, and Tavarus in favor against Flowy and Drew opposed. This matter involved what, to all of them, and to Rob in particular, could be the opportunity of a lifetime: fifty pounds of bulk marijuana that could be obtained, through Curtis's connect, at an up-front cost of $4,000 apiece—less than 10 percent of the market rate. All told, they stood to profit in the vicinity of $400,000 in a few months' time—a 2,000 percent return, enough to
take care of their mothers, grandmothers, girlfriends, and children for more than a year. Enough to buy suits for job interviews. Enough to not have to hustle for the foreseeable future, and perhaps ever again.

“I don't know,” Flowy said, looking down and away. Tonight he had drawn the chair with one leg missing. To stay upright, the corner had to be wedged against the hot radiator, and he was preoccupied with staying balanced without burning his thigh. Flowy was against the idea due to the sheer scope of the enterprise and the unlikelihood of pulling something like this off without the wrong people learning about it.

In a rare rebuttal to a Rob Peace argument, Flowy pointed out that two of the three rappers mentioned had been murdered. Rob countered that Tupac and Biggie were gone because money had made them lazy. “It won't make us that way,” he said. At the end of the day, they each stood to clear $76,000 minimum, enough for him and Tavarus to start their housing venture sans investors, enough for Flowy to move out of the hood, enough for Curtis and Drew to do whatever the hell they wanted.

“But how about your house?” Flowy said, to Curtis this time. “If we store the product downstairs—and we have to, there's nowhere else big enough—your house will be a target. Your ma's house. What if we can't hang here anymore? If it gets heavy, where would we go?”

“We'll keep it all quiet,” Rob answered. The drugs would be gone before anyone found out they were here. Rob assured him that he was aware of the risks—primarily police and other hustlers—and that he would assume them himself. All he really needed the four other men to do was watch his back.

“Why do you want to do this?” Drew asked Rob bluntly. “Why can't you just get a job, go back to school like you've been talking about?”

“What have I been trying to do for the last four months?” Rob replied loudly, his face kinetic with the question. His friends hadn't seen him this energized in a long time, since before his last trip to Croatia, talking about his six-foot blond-haired girlfriend and his business plan to sell ice makers in Pula. “Looking for a job every damn day. St. Benedict's, Yale—it doesn't mean anything here. That's how it is. So I'm gonna
make my own plans happen. C'mon now, aren't you all tired of struggling yet? You and me, the five of us, deserve to be doing more than getting by, doing what we can to keep a roof on our heads, just like everyone else. An opportunity like this doesn't happen every day, and we only have to do it once and, when we have the money, be smart with it. Yeah, there's police, hustlers, lowlifes, but you know the biggest risk in this business? It's trust and not having it. That's the one thing we
do
have right here.”

He watched Flowy and Drew exchange a look and a shrug, and he knew that he'd changed their minds.

Outside on Smith Street, the midnight atmosphere was quiet, neighbors having retired from their stoops, the children in bed, the hustlers migrated to adjacent neighborhoods with fewer families and thus more nocturnal action. A car passed every so often outside the barred front door, crunching over haphazardly shoveled snow.

At around one in the morning, the decision was made unanimously to obtain the weed, convert it to Sour Diesel in the basement, and sell it. They would be quick, they would be careful, and when the business was done they would be on their way toward the future they'd begun imagining more than a decade ago, at that dance party near Columbia high school. Rob grinned wide, distributed five glasses of vodka, and they toasted one another as well as a new hope that here, now, felt close enough to grasp.

“I
'LL GIVE IT TO YOU
,” Oswaldo said. “And after you pay me back, you and I will never speak again.”

The pause on the other end of the phone was long even for Rob. Then: “Okay. Thank you.”

That weekend, Rob drove the five hours up to Cambridge, frigid and windy in the middle of February, and knocked on Oswaldo's door. His old friend had the manila envelope ready. He handed it over without letting Rob inside. They exchanged very few words. Everything Os
waldo needed to hear had been said over the phone: the excuses and justifications and deflections, the guarantees for a quick turnaround, the assurance of, “I can do this, no problem,” the plea of, “I need this, man.”

“Thanks again,” Rob said. “It means a lot.”

Oswaldo shook his head. “Just pay me back. That's a lot of money for me.”

“I know.”

Oswaldo knew how much pride his old friend had sacrificed to ask for a loan of this size. Oswaldo also knew that the only reason Rob had come to him was that he couldn't go to anyone else: of all the dozens of people he considered his family, Oswaldo Gutierrez was the only one who might have this kind of money, understand what the money was going to be used for, and be willing to part with it. Rob hadn't expected that Oswaldo would also be willing to part with their friendship. In that moment, their last together, Rob's face pointed down to the floor by Oswaldo's feet. The face was impassive, even submissive.

“All right,” Rob said. “Later.”

Oswaldo watched him walk away, his shoulders nearly spanning the width of the building's narrow hallway. He thought of the time Rob had offered to buy him a ticket to Rio, just to experience a fleeting reprieve from Newark and from life, and Oswaldo had refused out of the conviction that, until he had his own life in order, he was not entitled to a vacation.

Not twenty minutes after getting out of his car, Rob drove five hours back to Newark.

Once the weed—fifty pounds of it, procured at a fire-sale rate from a bulk supplier whose “block got hot”—was safely in the basement, it didn't look like all that much, maybe twenty-five gallons in volume. If Rob still had his snake tank, the entire stash would have fit comfortably inside the glass walls. The disappointingly small heap of drugs didn't resemble the nearly half a million dollars that Rob planned to make in a few months' time. It didn't appear worth the friendship he had lost, the risks he had taken in transporting it here, the risks he was going to take
in selling it. The few dozen ziplocked bags looked like so much potting soil for Curtis's garden. They didn't look like freedom, not yet.

But still, even sealed in plastic, the concentration gave off a powerful aroma. In preparation for the pickup, Rob had insulated the front door that opened from the basement onto the sidewalk, as well as the doorway between the basement and the laundry area, with tarps. Without ventilation, the fumes intensified to the point where his eyes tingled and watered. Rob stood in the middle of the room and inhaled a deep breath through his nose. He grinned and told his friends that it wouldn't be so bad spending the next few weeks shut up down here, even with the gas mask. That night, the Burger Boyz permitted themselves to feel like kids again as they sampled the new product and talked and laughed. Smoke filled the basement, their old retreat. These dense, pungent clouds that unfurled between them felt, on that night, to be laced with hope.

The levity ended the next morning, when Rob woke up in the basement, hungover and staring at the tremendous amount of work that lay ahead. With the space and materials he had, the Sour Diesel conversion process had to be done a fraction of an ounce at a time, using a cylindrical sieve smaller than a bicycle pump. Any bigger, and the butane fumes would rise to the ground floor of the house and make the air noxious for Christopher to breathe. All told, he had to work about ten to fifteen hours to process each pound. Fifty pounds added up to more than five hundred hours. And he was still processing Amin's weed on the side, in amounts ranging from two to five pounds a week. If he worked twenty-four hours a day, he would need almost a month to convert their entire cache. He'd accounted for this from the outset and had considered the necessary time span a good thing; he would have no choice but to sell the drugs at a measured pace and thus ensure that no heads were raised in the neighborhood. But now those hours lay ahead of him, and the rest of the winter and early spring must have looked bleak and insular.

He attacked the work ferociously at first, disappearing into the basement for full days at a time, trudging up the back stairs only to eat and
use the bathroom, gas mask set on the table. He counteracted the grubbiness of this work by talking constantly about the eventual profits, how they would launder them, what they would do with them. He did this with the same low-key but constant energy that had characterized his last summer in East Orange before heading off to Yale: the idea that ahead of him lay countless hours of work and uncomfortable situations, but beyond that sacrifice a wide canvas of possibility unfurled. Like college, the next phase of his life existed as a necessary passage that must be endured to advance onward toward greater things.

“I
'M WORRIED ABOUT YOU
.
”

It was April. He was on the phone with Ina, who was now stationed at the Port Hueneme naval base in Oxnard, California. She'd been home from Afghanistan for almost a year. Her unit was supposed to be heading to the South Pacific, which in contrast to where they'd just served was being treated like a vacation. She'd just learned that, instead, they were being sent back to Kabul. She'd emailed Rob, and he'd called to ask if he could buy her a plane ticket to Florida to see her family before leaving. She couldn't go; her unit was on lockdown for the month preceding departure. She wouldn't have accepted anyway. Rob's generosity, manifesting itself now, was a big reason that he was where he was.

“Don't worry about me,” she replied. “I'll be fine.” She was aware that she'd said these exact same words to him before. Now she extended them to encompass her experience in the Afghan War, where her unit had worked building infrastructure to accommodate the troop surge. “I worry more about you.”

He laughed. “What do you worry about me for?”

“I was there for a year,” she said. “And no one I knew was killed or even hurt. Back home, though, a lot of people were killed. Friends of mine. That's why I worry about you.” To her, the war being fought abroad, engineered by powerful strangers, did not measure against the wars fought at home by people she knew.

He laughed again, and she hated how he always did that. “I'm cool,” he assured her. A few moments later, they said goodbye.

Other than that phone call, Rob hadn't been laughing much that winter. He'd made a rare miscalculation, not in the man-hours required to convert the stash to Sour Diesel but in the logistics of actually moving the product. Each pound divided into roughly 450 dime bags, which meant that there were 22,500 units to sell in total. Tavarus couldn't do any of the driving, because of his prior record of possession. Curtis and Drew weren't comfortable being mules, either. This trepidation hadn't come up during the groupthink that had delivered them to this point; as was often the case in decisions involving money and risk, there had been a lot of nodding heads in the lead-up followed by sheepish backtracking in the follow-through. Surprisingly, Rob didn't turn this into an argument. He'd pledged to carry most of the load, both figurative and literal, and he just wanted to see this through. Only Rob and Flowy could actually make deliveries, and two people working this kind of volume could not conceivably do so without attracting attention. He'd set a ceiling for each of them at ten drop-offs per night, which to anyone keeping track would reflect the one- to two-pound quantities he'd always dealt in the past. He was particularly worried about Amin catching wind of the added commerce and mistakenly believing that Rob was siphoning off his boss's supply. He refused to sell in East Orange at all, where the majority of his friends' contacts resided. Troublingly, he found that many of his friends were reluctant to help him broaden his network. He felt as if people who had always been perfectly happy to have him roll through and get stoned had suddenly grown up, or grown wiser, or grown disinterested in the culture he was depending on for one last good break. Or maybe they were just concerned about him, maybe they'd heard his talk about getting out of the game enough times already.