The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (18 page)

This word “fronting” was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive, and in college he saw it all around. He felt as though people were in a con
stant state of role-play before teachers, before each other, even before Jacinta in the dining hall (some students would pass her briskly as if in training for futures filled with ignorable service workers, while others would stop and chat with perky but manufactured curiosity). When he spoke contemptuously of this, about midway through that fall, I was surprised. For the last two months, because of how he carried himself, I'd figured him to have nothing more than marginal interest in all but a few of his peers. I learned that he tracked the people surrounding him with the observational intensity of the novelist I aspired to be. And he was not above judging them, often harshly.

“It's like nobody's real here,” he said, to Zina, late one night. Ty was at the library. I was in bed with the door closed. Rob and Zina were in the common room, curled together beneath a blanket. “It's like you can't have a real conversation with anyone.”

“You're real, baby,” she told him and made a cooing sound as the sheets rustled and the futon creaked.

“You, too,” he replied.

I didn't overhear any more, because I'd buried my head under the pillow in the event of imminent lovemaking. But I thought about those words often, along with other more oblique references to what he saw as a fundamental flaw in the social construct we now inhabited. I didn't know then the degree to which surviving his childhood had necessitated his own brand of fronting, the many different masks he wore on Chapman Street, at St. Benedict's, in East Orange; I didn't know about the Newark-proofing he had mastered. I'm certain that, if presented with this question, he would have argued very precisely that what he did growing up—what he still did when he went home—had not been fronting at all. He would have argued, and I would have believed, that his various manifestations of self represented the height of authenticity, that he was each of those people. “I'm not fronting,” he might have said. “I'm just
complicated.
”

P
ARENTS'
W
EEKEND CAME
a few weeks before Thanksgiving. As we scrambled to clean our room and fabricate the impression that we were in fact self-sufficient and responsible adults, Rob stowed a few books and clothes into his backpack.

“You making a break for Zina's place?” I asked.

“No, Newark,” he replied. He pronounced the city name very fast, and with no accented syllables: “nwerk.” I'd grown up near Newark, Delaware, which we called NEW-ark in our hybrid tristate dialect, a tic that Rob considered a sacrilege. (“Nwerk-nwerk-nwerk,” he'd spent the fall drilling me. “Say it three times fast, try not to sound like such a honky.”)

“Your mom isn't interested in the big football game?” I asked jokingly.

“She has to work all weekend,” he replied, not joking.

In a kind of reverse commute, as thousands of parents descended on the campus, he took the Metro-North southwest along the string of Connecticut commuter towns, through the Bronx, and into Manhattan's Grand Central. Then the subway shuttled him to Penn Station, where he boarded the Path train to Newark, and Flowy picked him up. The transit took about two and a half hours, and he would make it dozens of times over the next four years.

They smoked marijuana at Flowy's apartment for a bit. Flowy had performed well enough lifeguarding that the job was secure for the following summer. Between seasons, he was working for a landscaper blowing leaves. He'd rented an apartment with his girlfriend, ­LaQuisha, on a marginally safer street a couple blocks from where he'd grown up, near Vailsburg Park. The building was filled with loud neighbors and hallways that were busier at two a.m. than two p.m. But on the fifth floor, he had a nice view east toward downtown. From above, East ­Orange looked quite peaceful, particularly on autumnal evenings like this one. He asked Rob how school was going, and Rob rolled his eyes. “You know,” he said.

“How the hell do I know?” Flowy laughed. “I don't go to no Yale U.”

“The work isn't much harder than St. Benedict's, but the people”—and he paused to make one of his
psha
sounds—“the people are hard to take. Sometimes I just have to check out.”

“How do you have time to check out at a school like that?”

“That's the thing,” Rob said. “At St. B's, we had
no
time. Between work, lifeguarding, school, practice, film, homework, home shit, any spare time we had we just used it to sleep. Remember?”

“True. I remember sleeping on stairs, sleeping on the bus, sleeping on the benches by the pool.”

“Exactly. But in college, you don't have but three, sometimes even two hours of classes a
day
. Food's cooked for you, all the food you want—and boy, I
kill
those buffets. Rent's paid for. Utilities, too. No family around to see. You can only study so much”—Rob would get straight A's in a schedule that included advanced calculus, 200-level physics, and a religious studies class in Buddhism—“and the rest of the time is just that,
time
. I've never had that before. So you know, I'll go to my boy's house, smoke out a bit, just chill . . .”

They talked about their families and friends for a while, how Curtis by all accounts was the king of campus at Morehouse, but Tavarus and Drew were both struggling academically and, in Tavarus's case, financially. Tavarus had spent months assembling a package of loans to pay for college and now was looking at the interest rates and decades-long payment plan and wondering how a college education could possibly be worth it.

“How're you making it work?” Rob asked Flowy. “Food, rent, all that?”

“Hustling on the side, a little bit,” Flowy said. “You know.”

“You got a good connect?” Rob asked. A “connect” was a bulk supplier who provided marijuana to small-time dealers like Flowy, selling it to them for less than they could sell it for but assuming less risk. “He's cool?”

“Yeah, he's good people.” And then Flowy thought of something. “People must smoke up at Yale, right?”

“Hell yeah,” Rob said.

“Could be an opportunity.”

Rob began thinking as well.

Flowy offered to drive him to Chapman Street, two miles away. Rob opted to walk. Dusk had fallen, and Flowy watched from the window as his friend trudged off slowly through the hood. He was wearing the leather jacket that Zina had given him, and Flowy thought that was a mistake, something the young punk dealers making the first cash of their lives would do to flaunt it. Others would see the leather and think he had money on him. He wondered if Rob had grown so accustomed to his new surroundings, the poshness and security that Flowy imagined often while triangulating heaps of leaves in front of high-rise apartment buildings, that he'd lost that acute awareness of the details necessary to stay safe. But he didn't say anything. Rob, more than most, could take care of himself.

Yesterday Rob had walked about the same distance from our room to Science Hill for biology class: past Sterling Memorial Library and its four million books, across the marble stones of Beinecke Plaza with its sculpted memorials paying tribute to Yale students lost in both world wars, beneath the forty-foot golden dome of Woolsey Hall, past the university president's mansion on Hillhouse Avenue toward the modernist twenty-story building around which were clustered eleven different science labs, each of them larger than St. Benedict's. Today, he walked through the network of dealers who governed Vailsburg Park, along Central Avenue, a few blocks from where the Moore sisters had been killed, and then to Chapman Street. Along the way, he passed small houses, tall project towers, struggling businesses gating their doors, and poor people going wherever they were going, heads angled down. And with every step some sector of his consciousness must have wondered how he'd gone from this world to that, why he'd gone, for what larger purpose. He was stoned, and perhaps this softened the impact of his feet, the impact of these questions. And maybe it also stoked the idea that there was money to be made at Yale, which would carry none of the
hazards that it carried on the streets he was walking.

He made it home without incident and watched TV with his grandparents until Jackie got off work at eleven. The two of them ate dinner together at midnight, pork chops that Rob had bought on the way home and cooked with rice. He knew that she'd cried for the first two months he'd been away. He'd spoken to her on the phone nearly every night, short murmured conversations that he took into his bedroom with the door closed. I'd been affected by the way he said goodbye as he emerged: “All right, Ma, you're my heart,” with an earnestness that belied his demeanor. This made me feel guilty for all the times I'd hurried off the phone with my own mother (still working on those curtains, asking for further window measurements), saying briskly, “Later, Mom.”

While the rest of us toured our parents around campus that weekend, energetic with pride as we key-carded our way through the gated archways leading into catered buffets and ultimately congregating at the football field for the weekend's game, Rob sat on the porch and smoked cigarettes with Jackie before making the rounds of old friends. He stopped by St. Benedict's to have lunch with Friar Leahy and observe an off-season water polo shoot-around, giving in to the impulse to bark commands at the players. His Ivy League association caused him to be treated by former classmates, kids he'd led on the Appalachian Trail, as a conquering hero. After that, he visited his father at Essex County and, most likely, got up to speed on the appeal situation. By that time in early November, Skeet was still standing by while Carl Herman submitted the long succession of preliminary documents, many of them recycled from the successful PCR hearing. They were accustomed to the administrative lag times by now, but the waits carried a more expansive kind of anxiety than either of them had before known; in Skeet's and Rob's eyes, the man had been freed, his conviction overturned on no less an authority than the Constitution of the United States, and yet here they were again, battling the legal army of a state-sponsored apparatus that seemed intensely focused on keeping him imprisoned.

My own father had been sending me letters, which arrived in my post
office box each Thursday. He'd made this effort for my two older siblings during their first semesters at Yale. Dad was not the most emotive man, and he wrote these messages on small yellow Post-its, a few illegible sentences along the lines of,
Hope your classes aren't too bad and practice is going well. Grandma came over for dinner on Sunday. Mom made lasagna. Hang in there. Dad.
Attached by a paper clip would be a small news article from the local paper about my high school football team. As the weeks went on, the meaning of these letters evolved from nostalgic to something more powerful. They became the primary, tangible reminder that home still existed. While I moved through the trials and tribulations of this much-hyped college experience, the inconsistent loops and falls of my dad's handwriting still took minutes-per-word to decipher and my mom still made lasagna when Grandma came over. The world might be big and layered, but my life within it was small, secure, rooted in old simplicity.

Marijuana, I believe, served the same function for Rob: a bridge, spanning far more distance than my own, between the world he'd come from and the world he found himself in. I had no idea how much he smoked, and just like he had in his mother's house, he hid it well. He smelled more thickly of chlorine from water polo practice (the initiation for which had found him wearing a toga in the middle of the Commons dining hall, singing “Express Yourself” by Madonna) than he ever did of weed. He never smoked in the room. Scents could not cling to his leather jacket. He seemed zoned out fairly often, crouched over a textbook with the TV on and music playing loud, but I just figured that was a quirk: in order to focus he needed to create an excess of noise to shut out. Track practice was year-round, so Ty and I were catching the three o'clock shuttle bus out to the athletic complex a mile from campus, where we spent the fall running endless wind sprints across a grass intramural field, known as the Flats, that stretched a quarter mile toward a hillside of fiery autumnal leaves. We trained for two hours and then took the bus back to the campus gymnasium to lift weights for another hour, then had dinner before returning to the dorm around
seven to work. These were four hours every day during which we were completely checked out from the campus, loosening our bodies from our minds—and four hours that, I later learned, Rob spent getting high with a new group of friends who lived off campus, doing pretty much the same thing.

People called it the Weed Shack: a two-story clapboard house on Temple Street, two blocks west of campus proper. Sherman Feerick, a junior, was the leaseholder, and four or five others lived there with him. Sherman had grown up in Montclair and been a football star. He was an intelligent talker, and he talked nonstop. When he'd first met Rob, he'd said, “So you're the new one,” meaning the single token poor African American male Newarker admitted to Yale each year. The two men were drawn to one another, the way Newarkers living outside Newark tended to be. Their shared knowledge of the very particular milieu made for a strong bond, and so did the fact that Sherman consumed—and sold—weed. After his conversation with Flowy about possibly selling on campus, Rob ran the idea past Sherman, out of a respect more than a desire to have questions answered. Rob told him that Charles Cawley sent the tuition checks directly to the school, but that didn't account for books and lab equipment, which approached the level of his entire high school tuition. He told him that his mom was in bad shape—tired, poor, and now alone. He shrugged casually and said he could use a little money. And Sherman, rather than feel like his own earnings were threatened, began steering a little business Rob's way, just like Rob had done for Tavarus in high school. He schooled him on how to stay under the university's radar, which was practically effortless as long as you weren't stupid.