by Jeff Hobbs
Swimming and water polo were “cool” sports at St. Benedict’s, and Tavarus Hester was the prized recruit of the freshman class. Tavarus was short and scrawny but a natural and experienced swimmer. He had grown up in East Orange with a single parent. His was a rare case in which the mother had abandoned the family—she would disappear for stretches of six months or a year throughout his childhood, and she fled for good when Tavarus was twelve. He and his older brother had been raised by their father, a good man, a good parent, Tavarus’s best friend. In the spring of eighth grade, Tavarus’s father died suddenly of cancer. He’d gone to the doctor with a persistent stomachache one afternoon, and three months later was buried. Tavarus’s admission to St. Benedict’s with significant financial aid had been the last positive thing that had happened before his father died. Tavarus now lived with his aunt and grandmother, provided for by Social Security checks, and he’d entered St. Benedict’s in a conscious state of not giving a fuck about anything except drinking, smoking—and swimming.
Tavarus had been assigned to Rob’s color group, so he knew him a little better than the rest of their classmates. During the fall of freshman year, he’d sensed an anger in Rob that ran parallel to his own. So when football was taken away, he told Rob to come swim. He tried to explain how there was something cathartic about being in the water. You stared down at the thick black line scrolling steadily beneath you, and all you heard was the rush of water past your ears, and a life that at times felt cosmically complicated was reduced to the simplest elements: oxygen, buoyancy, propulsion.
Rob listened, and because he did, through swim team practice that winter and water polo the following autumn, he met the four friends who would compose the daily heart and rhythm of his life until its end.
DREW JEMISON GREW UP in Montclair, a middle-class suburb northeast of the Oranges. His father had left when he was four, but his mother’s boyfriend, Snow, had been a steadfast presence since then—not a father exactly, but the next best thing. Drew was massive, with a booming voice that belied his relatively soft sensibilities. He wasn’t a brawler because he didn’t have to be; just by standing up straight he projected an assurance of never being confronted about anything. He played goalie, his wide shoulders and long arms all but blocking the whole net.
Julius “Flowy” Starkes was tall and almost cartoonishly thin, with a long face that gave him an ever-present hangdog expression. He and his twin sister, Tess, had grown up in the worst of poverty, their father killed by violence and their mother troubled enough to practically destroy their formative years, yet functional enough that social services had never intervened in their home on 18th Avenue off the Garden State Parkway. They lived in the very center of greater Newark’s web of drugs and violence, a place where lethality hovered close by always. People called him Flowy for his ability to exist casually in a grid of blocks where men and boys could be killed simply for walking down a street they didn’t live on. He was all good with everyone; he just flowed. The last words he remembered hearing from his father, without much momentousness, were, “You ain’t gonna live to see twenty-one.” But his uncle was the dean of discipline at St. Benedict’s, and Flowy had chosen to apply to and pay for St. Benedict’s fully on his own, using Social Security checks for supplies. He’d undertaken this mainly because he’d known that going to public school, with girls, would sentence him to fatherhood by age sixteen, and he wanted to evade that pattern, one from which he himself had been born. At six five and 150 pounds soaking wet, he was awkward in the hallways, barely able to wedge himself behind the classroom desks. But in the pool, he was in control, and with a sharp scissor kick could elevate his body from the water up to the waist and extend his long arms still higher for towering, indefensible shot angles.
Curtis Gamble was an amiable leader in the school immediately. He was curious, easygoing, hilarious: the boy who knew how best to spend each hour. His mother was white, his father was black, and they were both schoolteachers. Their home on Smith Street in East Orange was about a mile southeast of Rob’s and would provide a refuge and a family for the rest of the newly formed crew—particularly Tavarus, Flowy, and Rob, none of whom had ever known truly what those two words meant. Curtis, with his relatively comfortable circumstances and laid-back approach to life, served as a model, the person they all wanted to be more like, the son they wanted to raise themselves someday.
The boys knew very few of these details about one another at first; they didn’t talk about their lives, their histories, their problems. Instead, they talked about music. They talked about what they wanted to eat. They talked about weekend parties that may or may not have been happening. They talked about practice and their hard-ass teachers and coaches. They talked about the momentary wants and obligations of their daily lives, the way all boys did. But their unvoiced pasts, the way their stories bridged and intersected and illuminated each other, formed the foundation upon which their bond grew—as well as the fact that they were members of what they assumed to be the only all-minority water polo team in the country, maybe even the world.
When semester grades were posted freshman year, with Rob’s name again clustered at the top of the list with a 4.0, he noticed that Tavarus was on the other end of the spectrum with a 0.7. Rob had known that Tavarus was struggling emotionally, but he didn’t know how badly until he saw the atrocious figure. Without mentioning the grades or alluding to any personal issues that spawned them, he organized a weekly study group after swim team practice. Rob didn’t need the group, and indeed spending nights helping his friends catch up actually hindered him from getting farther ahead. But he observed the depressive pattern Tavarus was in, and here was a tangible way to help.
Usually Curtis’s mother would pick up the boys downtown and bring them home to Smith Street. She would make sure everyone was fed—a laborious and calorically expensive task with five high school boys swimming the miles that they did, but she could tell there was minimal nourishment occurring in their own homes. The basement, adjacent to a laundry area, was cramped and penned in by metal storage shelves and boxes of old clothes. But it had a refrigerator stocked with soda, and the boys made it into a clubhouse of sorts, cramming themselves into the stuffy subterranean space with their books nestled on their laps. There, for hours on end, Rob would tell them what they had to know in each of their classes, including the ones he wasn’t taking himself. Curtis’s father was usually upstairs watching the news or prepping his lesson plans for the following day at school. To Rob and Flowy, his simple and constant presence was something to marvel at and, perhaps, envy. To Tavarus, Mr. Gamble was like a mirage of some kinder present day than that which he’d been granted. Then Mr. Gamble would speak, making abstract-sounding statements that almost always started, “When you all head off to college . . .” He spoke as if this, college, were a given.
The house at 34 Smith Street (incidentally, less than a block from where Georgianna Broadway and Deborah Neal had shared their house) was within walking distance of all except Drew’s. The house—specifically, the basement—became the physical center of the boys’ lives, where any or all of them could be found at any given hour when they weren’t at school, and sometimes when they should have been. They were comfortable there, warm, fed, far from conflicts. On the foundation of this sudden, unexpected stability, the boys built a brotherhood, a family structure that was easy and permanent and good.
MILLIONS OF LEAVES fluttered overhead. Water flowed along a ravine beneath them, from snowpack in the Catskills a hundred miles north. On either side, woods stretched out, impenetrable. Ahead and behind, the packed dirt of the trail meandered steadily, definitively through them. The air was sweet and washed and full of oxygen, though slightly tainted by the odor of 150 boys marching through it in a line two hundred yards long. Once in a while they would crest a rise and the view would open up, and still all they saw were more trees and maybe a distant church steeple to mark a town isolated in all the nature.
/> The fifty-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail, from High Point State Park to the Delaware Water Gap, was the physical and metaphorical completion of their first year of high school. Most complained about the heavy packs, blistered feet, mosquito bites, and the too-fast pace set by Coach Ridley up at the front of the column. Rob, who had been elected leader of his subgroup of eight students, was quiet during the walking phases but turned vocal during the camp setup and cooking. He seemed to derive a purpose and efficiency from what they were doing—carrying their own load as they covered a specified number of miles each day—that eluded most of his classmates. When they finally boarded the bus to go home, they were pumped full of endorphins and the once-a-year glee that accompanied the beginning of summer. Back in Newark a few hours later, its neighborhoods could not have felt more claustrophobic. Many of the boys had never before registered the fact that their hometown had the smallest proportion of open space per person of any city in the country.
That summer, Rob went to the public pool at Columbian Park four days a week to train with Flowy and Tavarus. They would swim a hundred laps and throw the ball around, shooting on a homemade net kept afloat with empty milk jugs. Afterward, they would go back to Curtis’s house, eat, play video games, and do schoolwork since St. Benedict’s held a Summer Phase to keep the students engaged.
Tavarus was tapped to go on a retreat to Maine, at the estate of Charles Cawley. Mr. Cawley, Class of ’55, was the CEO of MBNA bank and the largest benefactor of the school. Of the $5 million Friar Leahy raised to keep St. Benedict’s running each year, Mr. Cawley gave roughly half, sometimes more if needed. Every summer, the banker opened his vast property to twelve students: four top students, four average students, and four academically poor students. All were deemed by school counselors as coming from “troubled” circumstances (which was why Rob, who exhibited no outward signs of hardship at home, was not selected). The idea was to reward good work while providing incentive for those falling off. Tavarus was among the worst of the latter selection, and between the catered sit-down lobster dinners and fishing trips and lectures on economics given by credit card titans, he managed to start a fistfight. That night, still heated and snarling under his breath, he was ordered to call home and explain what he’d done. He called Rob instead.
“What happened?” Rob asked, sounding very much like the stern but patient father Tavarus had lost.
Tavarus explained: the kid had made a comment about his shoes, they’d started having words, one thing led to another, Tavarus wasn’t about to let himself be punked, etc.
“Wait, wait, wait, hold up,” Rob said. “You’re getting served steak and lobster, getting to sleep in your own bedroom with your own bathroom and a maid—and you’re starting shit over some words about shoes?” Rob made a psha sound. “Don’t be such a bitch, T.”
When he phrased it that way, Tavarus felt pretty much like a bitch.
“Just chill,” Rob told him. “Don’t let the stupid shit get to you. Think about the big picture.”
The retreat, a comprehensive immersion in the lifestyle of the haves, was transformative for Tavarus. When he returned, with Rob’s guidance and encouragement, he signed up for extra summer tutoring at the school and in the evenings let Rob coach him on how to study—specifically how to take quality notes in class and then focus on the meat of each subject without going cross-eyed from the details. When Curtis’s father spoke of college, Tavarus had never allowed himself to feel included in that particular brand of long-term thinking. And as a 0.7 freshman-year GPA was a deep, deep hole to be tasked with digging himself out of, he still didn’t. But in some long-dormant part of his consciousness, now stirred by his friend Rob, he saw it: a campus far from here with grassy quads and matching eaved buildings, with Tavarus himself walking through it carrying an armload of books. This image was grainy, but the resolution became sharper and more detailed with each hour spent in awe of Rob. During their first year, Tavarus had figured his friend to be naturally gifted, as if all he had to do to maintain that 4.0 GPA was open his eyes each morning. Over the course of that summer, he learned how doggedly Rob worked, the sheer volume of pages he read, the meticulousness with which he notated those pages. In Rob’s small room on the second floor of the Chapman Street house, a three-shelf bookcase was packed with black-and-white composition books, the front and back of each page filled with single-spaced notes from various classes. Tavarus thought, Damn, this is how you go places.
A BIG DRAW of the water polo team was that there were only three squads, including St. Benedict’s, in all of New Jersey. For competition, the team had to travel most weekends to tournaments in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, where the school would rent four doubles at a Motel 6 or Super 8 and the players would pack in seven and eight to a room.
During an early-season trip in the fall of sophomore year—Rob’s first on the team—one player had managed to bring along a six-pack of Bacardi Breezers. To enthusiastic hollers, he handed them out, but Rob refused his. He panned around the room of young black men sitting on cheap hotel mattresses, sipping on their pink carbonated lady drinks.
“You look like a bunch of pussies,” he cracked.
Flowy responded, “You’re so hard, you bring the party supplies next trip.”
The following weekend, Rob opened his duffel bag and pulled out a dime bag of weed as well as a fifth of E&J Brandy. He poured the liquor into small plastic cups from the lobby. Tavarus, who also had more than a bit of experience with drinking and drugs, was the only excited one. All the other boys sniffed the stuff, made faces, looked around to confirm that they were not alone in their apprehension. But they were trapped in this room now, with pride at stake as Rob Peace watched them expectantly. He was already rolling a small blunt, sliding his tongue across the cigarette paper and tweedling the package back and forth between his thumbs and index fingers.
“This gonna make me sick for the game tomorrow?” Drew asked.
“Game’s not till the afternoon,” Rob replied. “And you’re big as hell. You’d have to drink this whole fifth to get sick.”
“Smells nasty,” someone else said.
“That’s why you down it fast.” Rob took a shot, exhaled a sated breath, poured another.
Dutifully, without toasts or fanfare, the boys downed their shots. The brown, lukewarm spirit tasted toxic and burnt, like a zipper of fire being ripped down their throats. And yet even this first shot, before Rob finished rolling the joint and sharing hits, seemed to soften the world around them while at the same time hardening their own interiors. Once the weed entered into the proceedings, time itself began to thin out and grow gentler. They chanted rap lyrics and talked sports and mostly just laughed so hard that they were sure Coach Ridley would knock down the door and kick them out of school—which, because they were stoned, made them laugh harder. The next day, though Rob was not yet a strong enough swimmer to make the starting rotation, they won their JV game.
After that trip it was clear that Curtis may have been a leader of men, but Rob was the Man, a guy who could hook you up. And indeed, not long after that a few classmates approached him quietly in the hallway with a question (this as they walked single file, shoulders pressed to the wall, singing): Can we buy some weed off you?
“Hell no,” Rob said, and instead told them to talk to Tavarus, who was able to get real quantities of marijuana through his older brother. Tavarus was living in a one-story, two-bedroom home on Halsted Street with his grandmother, aunt, and numerous cousins. Rob knew how badly he needed the money, which was why he was surprised a few days later, when Tavarus slipped him a twenty-dollar bill in passing.
“Kickback,” Tavarus said quietly. “Thanks.”
Rob had the money changed at a store on the way home and left half for his mother, just like he always had. Twenty dollars for a referral was not bad at all.
CURTIS PULLED Rob and the rest of the team
out of the pool during warm-ups. “There’s a fight. Shit is real.”
With towels around their waists, they ran to the skyway connecting the school to the faculty parking garage across the street, from which they could see all the way down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. What they saw wasn’t a fight so much as a riot, with a few dozen students and some teachers from St. Benedict’s lined up across from a phalanx of students from the nearby public school, Central High. The Central kids would often venture down toward St. Benedict’s at the end of the school day to taunt what they saw as overprivileged prep schoolers, call them faggots and pussies and bitches. This had been a problem for years, and Friar Leahy addressed it from time to time during morning convocation. He told his boys to keep their heads down and maintain their perspective, and never to forget that words were just words. But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth. And just as they had with Tavarus at the Maine estate, words electrified that day and became clenched fists cracking against chins, brains colliding against crania. Teachers from St. Benedict’s—the young ones who’d gone to school here not long before and were still in tune with these tensions—came outside to break it up, only to become involved themselves. Rob’s crew watched the melee from one story up and fifty yards away, aching to take part—Rob more than the rest, watching his classmates be inexorably overcome by the greater numbers from Central. He headed for the stairs, his musculature tensing in full. Curtis grabbed him by both shoulders from behind.