The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (20 page)

The four of us had decided easily to stay together as roommates after freshman year, an agreement consummated with guy-ish head nods and shrugs. But Ty had a serious girlfriend, Adanna, the daughter of a wealthy Los Angeles gastric surgeon who specialized in stapling stomachs (Rob called her “Predator” for her long, thin dreadlocks, and gently mocked her wealth). She had drawn a single room in the lottery, so Ty effectively lived with her. Dan had fallen in with a popular crowd, kids who found a way to party each night of the week and were fond of saying, “Ninety percent of what you learn in college happens
outside
the classroom.” And so, in our dorm room, Rob and I tended to be alone,
quietly coexisting for the most part, sometimes talking about girls, football, food. “Buuuuuullshitting,” he called what we did, fondly, and we did it all the time. Though we spoke about nothing much at all, this was how I learned about the football games of his youth, the afternoon with his father listening to a Yankees game on a stranger's front stoop, Jackie and his grandparents and Victor, and the deep role that marijuana played in his life: “I smoke a blunt, and I can hang out or study or just chill,” he said dazedly, “and it's like nothing matters, not even time, and for a couple hours I can just
be.
”

He once looked up from across the room and said, “You know what I like about you, Jeff?” Having been curious about this for some time but somehow afraid to ask, I asked. “Because it's aaaaall good with you. You just read your books and write your stories and don't give a damn.” A low-level pride coursed through me upon hearing his observation. In a world where defining yourself felt unnecessarily complicated most of the time, I thought that being “all good” was a pleasingly simple way to do it.

By virtue of proximity, I felt more involved in his life than I ever would have predicted during the first months of college. When he and Zina had broken up—after my initial relief had subsided—I'd consoled him with comments like, “She's about to graduate anyway; the long-distance thing never works . . .” (The incident in the dining hall was the second time he'd put his fist through a wall; the first had been at an Af-Am House dance party, when he'd seen Zina grind-dancing with a senior, flaunting herself in front of him.) We'd chosen our majors at the same time—mine was English language and literature, his molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Because of friends on the track team as well as Rob, I felt relatively in sync with the black community and would regularly show up at the Af-Am House dances to be schooled on how to move my hips from side to side without overinvolving the shoulders, how to lose or at least soften my white man's overbite and the irresistible tendency to snap my fingers with the beat. Those friends called me “Da Jeff” and, like Rob had once done with Hrvoje Dundovic
on water polo bus rides, goaded me to belt out the lyrics to songs like “Shake Yo Ass.” I was a source of amusement and happy to dance (literally) in that role. Although there was something disingenuous about me being there—like a benign joke we were all in on—I found it far easier to loosen up in that situation than I did with more preppy classmates, among whom existed a pressure to align with a specific kind of humor and overall social affect. The black students of our year anointed themselves the “Class of Oh-Deuce,” and from time to time a call-and-response chant would break out during a dance party, with one person yelling,
“Oh-WHAT?”
and the rest of us responding,
“Oh-DEUCE!”
over and over, with vitality and pride.

I didn't smoke marijuana at all at the time. I was so obsessed with track—with literally and metaphorically running around in circles for hours each day—that I didn't even permit myself caffeine. Never a part of Rob's stoner group, I lived unassumingly on its fringe. As I began to recognize the faces and names of his more regular customers, we all developed a low-key rapport, sometimes even pausing to converse for a minute or two in the common room before they entered Rob's room to get what they'd come for. I was quick—far too quick, not to mention self-righteous—to judge these people as “wastoids” (though Rob seemed to smoke more than any of them, I somehow never included him in this blanket mental term). But I never dug any deeper than the shallow surface; I never pulled back far enough from my seemingly comprehensive breakfast-classes-lunch-practice-weight-room-dinner-library-sleep schedule, as well as my own perception of how they spent their free time, to consider that each of them—just like Rob, just like me, just like any one of my friends—possessed a nineteen-year-long story that had culminated in them being here, now, at Yale, buying pot from my roommate.

Raquel Diaz was almost as colorful in dress as she was in attitude, befitting her hometown of Miami. (Her Puerto Rican family pronounced the English
y
sound as
j
, and when she'd been accepted to Yale the house erupted with exclamations of, “Raquel is going to
jail
! Raquel is going to
JAIL
!”; she struggled not to project undue symbolism onto the dialectical mishap.) A dense tangle of long, reddish-brown, tightly curled hair burst from her scalp at all angles. She was the kind of person around whom you had to be careful about the opinions you expressed, because if she disagreed, she would let you know it. She was like a beautiful tropical bird, all smooth placid feathers one moment, and the next a quick-striking chaos of talons and beak. She'd met Rob during the second or third night of college, when she found him stoned to the point of passing out while her friend, a beautiful future actress from Morocco named Lyric Benson, performed something like a belly dance above him. Raquel's father, a Cuban opera singer and Santero, had stormed out of their home when she was six months old, following a fight with her mother. He'd never returned. Her barrio upbringing had been rife with anxieties similar to those Rob had experienced with a single, poor, minority mother. Like Rob, she had controlled these stresses by excelling in sports and academics. However, unlike Rob, Raquel was temperamental and unpredictable, and at Yale she found few socially acceptable means by which to vent her various frustrations. Increasingly as college wore on, she vented them to Rob, often in the boiler room two stories beneath the college's ground floor, where they met to share a blunt after dinner a few nights a week. While the heavy machines around them pumped heat to a few hundred students above, she found in Rob Peace a strange blend of an older brother's strength and a sister's sensitivity that she'd never encountered before: someone with whom she could just chill and worry less about the tuition installments her mother might not be able to send, and exchange gripes about the people around them without judgment. They were at Yale. They had “won.” But they both learned the hard way that “winning” didn't mean they wouldn't encounter problems—problems that some herb and good company went a long way toward resolving.

Daniella Pierce grew up in a biracial family in Oakland, California—she and her mother were white, her father and her two siblings were black—and she'd gone to a predominantly black public high school. In
the auditorium on their first day of freshman year, the principal had instructed the students to look at the person sitting on their right and left and understand that one of them would not graduate. This had proven to be the case. She'd left for Yale a few weeks after her high school boyfriend—black—had gone to prison for dealing, and she brought that conflict, among many others, with her. She wore baggy clothes, spoke with urban intonations, and went out exclusively with black men—­including Rob “for a minute.” Academics were particularly hard for her, and she spent most days feeling unfit to be a part of this student body. She was majoring in psychology, but no matter how many hours she invested, no matter how much extra help she sought, she felt destined to struggle academically. Like many students accustomed to being the smartest kids in suboptimal high schools, she came to Yale and for the first time felt stupid. Also like many students, pride prevented her from seeking out the infrastructure of tutors the Yale system had in place (ironically, the affluent kids from prestigious high schools—those who needed it the least—often took the most advantage of these utilities to sharpen their already-honed academic skills). But then, while stressing about a test late at night and seriously considering transferring to a California state school, two strong hands would land on her shoulders and begin gently massaging her muscles, and that deep, assuring voice would say, “It's cool, Daniella, it's cool.” And in those moments, with Rob standing behind her, she could permit herself to believe, if only fleetingly, that it was.

Perhaps the most frequent presence in Rob's room was Oswaldo Gutierrez. He'd grown up in Newark's predominantly Puerto Rican North Ward, in a small, chaotic home owned by his grandparents and populated by transient uncles and cousins. He was slight in stature, but he had a sharpness to him somewhere in the hard-to-pin layers between his wiry physique and elusive personality. Though he was always polite to me as he ducked beneath my arm that held open the door, he seemed to keep an invisible fence raised around him, complete with a sign that read, “We're fine, but we're not the same, so don't get too
close.” Oswaldo was, in a word, guarded. An uncle who worked for a Colombian drug cartel was paying his tuition. The disparities between the house he'd grown up in and the towers he now lived in clung to him constantly. He found himself angry all the time, judging his classmates and what he saw as their blithe existences, their wide-open futures that didn't involve taking care of a sprawling, violent, dysfunctional family. In Rob, he found a man who harbored many of the same feelings but was able to do so seamlessly (at least outwardly so), with a smile and some profane but harmless shit talk over a blunt.

Rob had many friends. Danny Nelson was technically his boss in the dining hall, a slight student from the Bronx who walked around campus with his earphones in, often alone; from a distance he looked to be shuffling along gloomily with his head pointed straight down to the ground, but up close you could see that he was actually dancing in a kind of fox-trot, with a subtle smile aimed at no one. Yesenia Vasquez was Oswaldo's girlfriend and an aspiring poet. Nick Crowley, our hall mate freshman year, played on the lacrosse team. Rob had friends from the water polo team, friends from the Weed Shack, friends from his science classes. Alejandra, Cliff, B.J., Arnoldo, Linda, Maria, Chris, Josh, Candace, Anthony, Pablo . . . so many names that I eventually ceased keeping track. In contrast to the unnervingly quiet kid with whom I'd first shaken hands in Lanman-Wright Hall, Rob had become something of a beloved presence on the Yale campus, and not simply because he sold drugs and hung out. He had a natural curiosity about the stories of those around him paired with a brain that was quick to draw insights from within each of these stories. And Raquel, Daniella, and Oswaldo were the people who became most intimate with his own story. With Raquel, he would talk about family. With Daniella, he would talk about classes. With Oswaldo, he would talk about home. With each of them, he would talk about Life: where it was now, where it needed to get, and how to bridge that gap, which sometimes seemed gaping. They'd made it to Yale, but once there they were all surprised to learn that they hadn't Made It, not yet.

I respected the fact that these friendships with Rob were far deeper than my own, and I made it a point never to intrude. I was attuned to the worth of each one, and I felt that, if I were to make an overt effort to take part, I would be thieving somehow. But still, as time passed and I watched their various bonds strengthen, I felt jealous.

I didn't have any real grounds to feel that way, especially since, as a friend, Rob saved me twice sophomore year. The first time was on Halloween. Through a friend who played the flute in the Yale Symphony Orchestra, I'd gotten a job as a “bouncer” at their annual midnight Halloween show. The atmosphere was more like a Kiss concert: Woolsey Auditorium became a throng of drunk people in elaborate costumes, bodies hanging over the balconies, all waiting anxiously for the curtain to rise on the symphony (it says a lot about Yale that this was one of the most anticipated social events of the year). My job was to make sure no one snuck in the side door to the right of the stage. A hundred ticketless students were outside pounding to get in, and I had to make sure no one went out those doors, either, because if they pushed them open, the inflowing tide would prove impossible to stop. Fire code violations would surely follow. I took this responsibility seriously, standing in front of the door in a black T-shirt, with my arms crossed and a dour expression intended to convey impassability.

For most of the night, I politely turned back errant and inebriated students, who regarded me as some meddling asshole before turning to seek another exit. Then a tall, muscular guy—another heavyweight rower—walked toward me with some momentum. I sidestepped to block him. “Sorry, can't go out this way.” He ignored me and juked the other way. I blocked him again; this time his chest collided with my still-crossed arms. He backed up three steps and barreled toward me. From high school football, I knew how to lower my center of gravity, the way Rob once did in the street. We thudded together and I gave no ground. Suddenly his fists were thumping against my chest and shoulders, and I returned in kind, exhilarated by my first collegiate fistfight. Because he was so drunk and I wasn't, I performed adequately, at one
point connecting an almost-uppercut to his jaw. He ceased bothering with punches and tackled me instead, and we tumbled through the door I'd been enlisted to keep shut, down five concrete steps, onto Beinecke Plaza. We stood, gathered ourselves. I hollered, “Get him outta here!”—but to little effect, because he'd now been joined by two rowing teammates and all three were bearing down on me while the kids who'd been pounding to get in stepped back, amused, reducing my thoughts to,
Oh fuck, this is going to be embarrassing.