The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (30 page)

The cell phone number I had didn't work, either. I contacted as many mutual friends as I could think of, but no one knew how to get in touch with Rob Peace. How strange it was that, in the minds of these friends (admittedly not his closest at Yale), Rob had already become a kind of fond but removed afterthought: “Oh, yeah, Rob Peace, no, I haven't heard from him since college, I wonder how that dude's doing . . .” Finally I thought to ask my mother if that contact sheet, the one we'd received before freshman year, still existed. She found it at the bottom of a drawer in my old desk at home, and I called the house on Chapman Street. No one answered the first few times I tried, and there didn't seem to be an answering machine. I began letting go of the effort, distracted by the nonprofit work, the novel I was working on, the girls I was pining for. Not until late in the fall did our roommate Ty, now in
his first year at Harvard Med School after completing his fellowship in Cambridge, email me a cell number.

“Hey, Rob,” I said. And when it took him a moment to place my voice, “It's Jeff.”

He mumbled, “Hey, whassup, Da Jeffrey?”

“Just wanted to see how it's going.”

“It's going.”

“What are you . . . up to?”

“Just started teaching.”

“Like, in grad school, or . . . ?”

“Nah. High school. St. Benedict's.”

“How is that?”

“It's cool. I want to kill these little shits sometimes, but it's cool.”

He was in the middle of his workday and jumped off quickly, before I even thought to mention Africa. I hung up and sat in my two-hundred-square-foot studio in Little Italy (my salary from the nonprofit was a free rent-controlled apartment in the chic neighborhood), and I fell into a brief but unsettling state of melancholy. The truth was he hadn't seemed all that interested in hearing from me, which implied that, just as Rob had seemed to be fading from friends' minds, so were we from his.

O
N A NIGHT IN
August 2003, not long before we'd spoken, one of Rob's bulk suppliers had pulled a gun on him, after Rob had threatened to walk away in the midst of a failed negotiation. The threat was fairly standard; the gun was not. Rob didn't know if the weapon was loaded, and he later claimed to be certain that its bearer had no intention of actually pulling the trigger. But triggers did get pulled—they were pulled all the time here. They'd been pulled on former classmates from Oakdale, Mt. Carmel, and St. Benedict's. They'd been pulled on friends of both his mother and father. One had been pulled on Charlene and Estella Moore. The feeling of having the barrel of a revolver trained on you at close range was a purely visceral one, he confided in Oswaldo Gutier
rez just before the first day of school. All the knowledge in his brain of chemokines and crystallography, all the triumphs and disappointments of his life had been rendered worthless, and his consciousness had narrowed to a very fine point of focus, no wider than the muzzle of a .22 caliber revolver. He paid the extra couple hundred dollars that the supplier demanded of him. Then he began his high school teaching career, and he got out of the game.

The incident with the revolver, along with the loss of his savings, had provided bookends to the summer of 2003. During the months between, the business of hustling had cost him more in anxiety than it had returned in cash. Dealing had been too cushy at Yale; he'd been spoiled there by classmates who came to him and would pay what he asked. In Newark, driving around dangerous streets in the middle of the night to haggle over $5 and $10 with desperate men and women (the women, he felt, were the hardest and saddest to deal with), the work seemed to epitomize the “wear and tear” Wayne Ridley had mentioned in the context of teaching high school. At its foundation was the exposure to the people who lived and died by this commerce—not just the dealers and suppliers, but the users as well.

Rob was self-aware enough to understand his own relationship with marijuana, which wasn't complicated to him. He knew the science behind it. He knew what it cost him. Though he was addicted to it by all definitions regarding frequency of use, he was intelligent enough to control that addiction. “High functioning,” he called himself. But seeing regularly the people who had an even greater reliance on the drug, yet without the ability to understand what that reliance meant, spawned pity in him. Outwardly, this pity manifested itself as scorn. “Motherfuckers be
lazy
,” he would say to Flowy, Tavarus, and Curtis. But within his consciousness, his friends believed him to feel extraordinarily sensitive toward this widespread plight in the city in which he'd grown up, and perhaps even guilty in knowing that, had he not been born with his particular brain and his particular mother, he wouldn't be any different from these people. And maybe that was why he stopped providing them
with weed.

Those who knew him well couldn't believe it when he gave up dealing, a decision that went far beyond risk or morality, far beyond the moment of finding himself on the wrong end of a gun. These friends were happy for him and this strong movement he'd made toward reactivating the lifestyle that had gotten him into Yale the hard way.

Perhaps as a part of that movement, once the school year was under way, Rob ultimately forgave Carl. For months, he'd been avoiding the man, telling Jackie to keep him away from the house (though never telling her why), staying away himself when Carl was there. And then, suddenly, his rage seemed to disappear. He entered the parlor one evening to find Carl sitting on the sofa, and he nodded and said, “What's up?”

Carl replied, “Same old.”

Then the two men sat down to dinner with Jackie, Horace, and Frances.

Later, Rob told Curtis, “The man's like a dog. You can't blame a dog for eating up a steak if you leave the steak on the floor.”

T
HE GROUP WAS
called Unknown Sons, named that by the students who participated. Nine kids had shown up today. Rob didn't run the meetings—that was done by one of the professional counselors on staff at St. Benedict's. But he often attended, usually just to observe. Every member of the group came from a fractured family, and though each brought experiences specific to him, sharing those experiences helped ease the feeling of aloneness that invariably attached itself to losing a parent.

A student was talking about his mother's drinking and how his attempts to get her to stop—pleading with her, shaming her, hiding bottles—only made her angry, which caused her to drink more.

“You're trying to fix her,” Rob spoke out and felt the weight of nine troubled souls watching and listening.

“Well, yeah,” the boy replied. “Get her to cut that stuff, anyway.”

“You can't fix the person causing the problem. You can't worry about
other people. Only one you can worry about is you.” The boy nodded. “And sit up straight, while you're at it.”

“Yes, Mr. Peace.” The boy sat up at his desk.

Morning convocation, classes, lunch, classes, practice: for eleven hours a day, Rob's life played to the very same rhythm that had existed before he'd gone off to college. And this rhythm was a pleasing one.

He was a good teacher—not great, necessarily, but very good, and with an innate ability to connect with his students on the level at which their minds operated. Rob had always approached his schoolwork with a cumulative mentality: stacking one new understanding upon the other until the full picture was imprinted in his memory. Memorization had never been the goal for him, as it had been for many other premeds; understanding had always been the goal. As such, teaching introductory biology to underclassmen required almost no effort. He used neither textbooks nor notecards in his lectures. He made a clear distinction between students who truly weren't able to grasp the basics of photosynthesis or genetics, and those who were capable but unengaged. On those in the latter group, he came down hard.

“You're lazy, aren't you?” he would ask.

“Nah, just bored,” would be the response.

“You're bored in my class?”—with one of his
psha
sounds—“Here's a hall pass. Go somewhere else more stimulating. Good luck on the test next week.”

Wide-eyed, disbelieving: “Thanks, Mr. Peace.”

And when the student received a poor grade, Rob would have him stay after class and say, “Now let's get to work.”

“Yes, Mr. Peace.”

He commanded respect by being the man he was: the tough and hard-talking owner of the Presidential Award and the Yale diploma. At the same time, as he did outside school, he kept his rare pedigree under wraps to the extent that he was able. He easily could have approached his role as teacher along the lines of,
Look at what I've accomplished, here's how I did it, now emulate.
He chose instead to get down in the muck with his
students, drill them with good study habits, embarrass them when they copped attitude, and utilize their pride as the primary motivator of their lives, as it had been his. He didn't spout lectures about actions and consequences, avoiding the kind of life they didn't want to have. He focused on the life they
did
want to have. His attitude toward his students' work habits was the same, in a way, as it had been toward me and my writing aspirations: “If you want to, and you don't, then that's on you.”

Jarring to him was how sensitive, or soft, the students collectively seemed to be, as well as how aggressively they talked back to authority figures. Rob recalled being slapped by seniors when his shirt was untucked, profanely berated by teachers and coaches on the rare instances when he failed to put forth a full effort. He recalled those thousands of laps the swimming and water polo teams endured without question. He recalled an unspoken, almost solemn understanding among his class that what they were doing in this building was vital and these punishments were a necessary part of the journey. He recalled a pervading silence—in the classrooms, in the library, in the hallways aside from the freshmen singing school songs—that spoke to the fact that what was happening here went beyond the anxiety of college acceptance letters and approached the realm of life and death.

He did not recall parents coming to the school and angrily demanding a sit-down with Friar Leahy following a relatively minor disciplinary action, which happened to Rob just a month into the job. A sophomore had disrespected him in class. The incident was nothing major: the kid had been talking in the back during Rob's lecture, and Rob had called him out on it, and he'd mouthed off, and Rob had done the same thing he did whenever anyone talked back to him, Yalie or family or hustler. He'd confronted the situation directly.

“You think you're the Man now, don't you?”

“No. Just don't need you all up in my face.”

“You think I'm in your face?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Rob said. “If I was in your face, you'd be running. I'm just asking you, what benefit do you get out of interrupting my class?”

“I don't know. I had something to say and I said it.”

“Tell me, what was it?” The boy looked away from him, blood beginning to color his expression. “Tell me and I'll get out of your face.”

“It was nothing.”

“Nothing, huh? Sounds pretty damn important. Now tell me something else. Tell me what you've done for someone today.”

“What?”

“Name something you've done for someone else today.”

“I don't know.”

“Exactly. You haven't done anything for anybody. So shut the fuck up.”

The next morning, in Friar Leahy's office, the boy's mother made a loud fuss about the humiliation of her son and how this was not what she paid tuition for, etc. She wanted an apology. Rob gave her what she wanted, but the fact that he'd done so ate at him for weeks afterward. He hadn't been in the wrong, he was sure of that, and he couldn't remember a single prior instance in his life when he'd given a false ­apology—except maybe to the master and the dean when they'd confronted him about dealing at Yale.

Once water polo season began, the pool was no different: kids begged out of workouts, half-assed their laps, pushed their feet off the bottom midway, pointing defiant eyes at Rob as he told them to get their fucking heads in the water.

Coach Ridley laughed when Rob vented about it, and he reminded his former player about a certain freshman who could barely swim, who had ditched practice for a week: “Something about a sprained back and sneezing while pulling a milk carton from the fridge?”

Rob said, “That actually happened. A hundred percent legit.”

“Just remember,” Coach Ridley told him, “these kids aren't that much younger than you, and you and your boys were a bunch of punks, too. It's part of the job. Don't let it get to you or you'll go nuts.”

The uniforms had changed. Kids couldn't wear red, blue, or yellow due to the recent flourishing of gang culture in the city. They
wore white and gray instead. The kids, in Rob's mind, might have gone soft, but the neighborhood around them had become harder in the years since he'd left. In the weight room, on bus rides, in tutoring sessions, he talked to them about Newark-proofing themselves, living in the hood and respecting the hood without becoming a part of the hood. When he'd been a student, the school had addressed these pressures through discipline and activity but without pointing directly to the anxiety of poverty and violence. But parents were less willing to hand their children over to the school and its philosophies now, and so the teachers were not permitted the same level of influence over the students' time. Rob sought to influence their minds instead. Again and again he told them, “Don't mess with drugs. Don't mess with people who mess with drugs. Don't get involved. It's not a game you want to be playing.” While hypocritically failing to acknowledge his own history, a certain world wisdom evidenced itself in the words that rendered this lesson—which would have been rote coming from most other teachers—worth listening to when it came from Mr. Peace.