by Jeff Hobbs
“You don’t even have shoes on.”
Rob looked down at his gym shirt, the towel around his waist, his bare feet on the cold concrete. “Fuck,” he said.
Flowy murmured, “I’ll go down there. I know those boys. I’ll talk.”
They went inside and got dressed. Rob and Flowy intended to find familiar faces in the Central High group, and pacify. But by that time the police had already arrived, and seven people were in handcuffs. Still, Flowy wandered up to the front steps of Central at the end of the day, founds some guys he knew, tried to sort out what exactly had happened, and ensure that everyone was cool.
The next morning, Friar Leahy assembled the entire school in the gymnasium and lit into students and faculty alike for two hours. He gave sermons every Sunday in the church that adjoined the school, and the one he gave that day was full of fire and brimstone, rendering a vivid version of the future begotten by what had happened: prison, poverty, and early death—a future that many of the boys saw around them every day. The friar’s voice, hoarse to begin with, faded to an angry, condemning rasp.
Afterward, a rumor began spreading that Friar Leahy was going to retire in the wake of this, that he couldn’t go on leading people who wouldn’t follow him.
Rob, Curtis, Flowy, and Tavarus set a meeting in his office, and they begged him to stay. They promised to corral the student body and bring guys back in line. With Rob speaking for the group, he told Friar Leahy that if he were to leave, they would leave, too. Because they still had two years and change, and they wouldn’t go to a school where Friar Leahy wasn’t the headmaster.
Friar Leahy had in fact never harbored any thought of leaving the school he’d built, but he indulged the boys their pleas because they were so sincere. What struck him most about the meeting was that he’d never heard Rob Peace speak so much at one time, and he saw in the speech a kind of quiet leadership that came along rarely. Later that year, he asked Rob to lead the freshmen on the Appalachian Trail in May, a task normally given to juniors.
During the hike, a rainstorm moved in quickly, in the middle of the night, shrouding them in total blackness and flooding the campsite with runoff beneath the sharp strikes of lightning and resounding thunder. While everyone scrambled for shelter from the lashing winds, communication along the line of campsites was lost, and Rob’s group of twenty-four freshmen became isolated from the rest. Their cheap tents collapsed. The freshmen, though just a year younger than he, were mortally scared. More than a handful of them had witnessed gunfights in their neighborhoods, seen dead bodies sprawled on concrete. But this, the raging of nature, was completely new and terrifying. Rob had everyone hold hands—“Just do it,” he growled when one student gave it a homosexual slant—and he led them down off the exposed mountainside like children. They left everything except rain gear so that they could move fast. They ended up in a small town off the trail, two dozen black kids huddled in the front yard of a rural house at three in the morning while Rob knocked on the door and, very respectfully and politely, asked if he might use the phone inside. After Rob called a faculty coordinator back in Newark to let him know they were okay, the homeowner asked if the boys wanted to stay in his garage until the storm let up. Rob declined; now that no one was going to be struck by lightning or washed down a mountainside, he wanted his group to get through this on their own.
The next fall, a new addition came to the Class of ’98 in the tall, pale, goofy form of Hrvoje Dundovic. He’d come alone from Pula, Croatia, fleeing the economic malaise that had gripped the country since the Balkan conflict of 1992. He was living with a host family in East Orange, an arrangement made through the St. Benedict’s alumni network. Having come from a suburban seaside enclave in a nearly all-white country, he could not have ended up in a more alien environment. During nights and weekends, he rarely went outside. At school, the cultural divisions were amplified by the fact that this was a particularly tight-knit class that had been together for two years already. Three months into the school year, he had yet to hear anyone, including teachers, pronounce his name correctly (HIT-of-way). He did, however, join the water polo team. He’d grown up playing water polo, which was one of the reasons he’d landed at St. Benedict’s. His strategy to fend off homesickness was to listen to his Walkman all the time and lose himself in the songs he’d grown up listening to in his bedroom back home.
“What you got in there?” Rob, now one of the leaders of the varsity team, asked out of the blue. He nodded toward the music player.
“The Misfits,” Hrvoje answered in his thick glottal accent.
Rob motioned with his hands, and Hrvoje slipped off the headphones and passed them over. Rob’s eyes went wide with distaste upon hearing the screechy wail of Glenn Danzig, the metallic confusion that was the guitar and drums. “What the hell kind of music is this?”
“Prog rock,” Hrvoje answered. “Or some call it punk.”
“Damn, that is awful.” Rob walked away shaking his head and laughing.
Hrvoje assumed this exchange would be the end of their acquaintance, but the next day Rob came back to hear more, Black Flag in the Walkman this time. Rob knew what prog rock was now; he’d looked it up in his Encyclopaedia Britannica the night before. He had memorized the dates, the important figures in the movement, the intellectual thinking behind the sound. From then on, the two of them sat together on bus rides, Rob willing himself to develop an appreciation, if not a taste, for punk rock while he coached Hrvoje through the lyrics of his own favorites: DMX, Nas, Tupac. An image that would be remembered always by the team was Hrvoje, standing in front of the bus aisle while Rob goaded him on, both hands folded into hang-ten signs and jabbing at the air, singing Tupac’s “Hail Mary” in his Croat accent.
Rob, Tavarus, Drew, Flowy, and Curtis called themselves the Burger Boyz, because between class and practice they could typically be found at the Burger King around the corner. Rob never bought food for himself. Tavarus would spring for him on occasion, a culinary version of the kickbacks he still gave to Rob for shepherding marijuana business his way. Most of the time, Rob was content to suck on ketchup packets from the condiment bins, sometimes a dozen in one sitting. He told his friends that he did it for the salt, and he would segue into a chemistry-based explanation of the NaCl exchange necessary, on the cellular level, to drive the body through the workouts to which Coach Ridley subjected them. But his friends knew he was concerned about money. They’d all been to his house, registered the austerity of it, the way the lights or the heat would be shut off from time to time. By now, they called Jackie “Ma.” Sometimes she would bring home surplus food from work, which was a long fall quality-wise from the homemade spaghetti and casseroles Mrs. Gamble made for them, but the boys were always gracious. The only other food option at Rob’s house were the rows of Oodles of Noodles in the cupboard, bought from the Price Cutter on Springfield Avenue.
They all were poor, but Rob seemed to hold his poverty closer than the rest of them, to feed off it like he fed off the ketchup packets: a nutritionless condiment that powered him through miles and miles of water. He didn’t joke about being poor the way most did; he didn’t outwardly resent it, either. Rather, he carried it with him under vigilant guard: the one pair of school shoes he shined obsessively, the earnings figures still recorded in the composition book beside his bed, the encyclopedias he kept dusted, the refusal to spend money on anything personal, not even weed, which he’d been procuring through Carl, whom Rob called his uncle, since Carl had been the most constant male presence on Chapman Street since his father’s imprisonment. His friends figured that he contained whatever anxiety he felt because he alone knew that he would one day overcome it, and not even too long from now.
THE WATER POLO TEAM was strong their junior year, in the fall of 1996. Rob, now the lead butterflyer on the swim team, played in the “hole,” the basketball equivalent of a power forward. At five eleven with a barrel chest and short but mus
cular arms—as well as the ability to absorb and dole out punishment—he was naturally suited to the role. The offense ran through him as he hovered five yards in front of the opponent’s goal, shrugging off defenders who would alternately lock their forearms under his armpits to pull him underwater, dig their nails (unclipped specifically for this purpose) into the flesh of his neck, angle their kneecaps to take shots at his testicles underwater, where the refs couldn’t see. Rob, often deploying the covert elbows that his father once schooled him on, was adept at shrugging these defenders off so that he could pull in a pass, take a shot himself, or kick the ball out to Flowy or Hrvoje on the wings. Tavarus, small but quick enough to cover the full width of the pool, played defense along with Drew in the goal. A big part of their game was the intimidation inherent in a team of muscular, razor-mouthed, dark-skinned (all except for Hrvoje, who looked like a pale, skeletal specter among them) inner-city boys walking into the pools of the privileged majority, there to play rough and win games dirty if need be—and talk more than their share of smack while they did it. If parents in the stands weren’t complaining to the refs about their language, then the Gray Bees figured they weren’t talking enough. The team carried with it an unbridled quality, some primal mixture of arrogance and competitiveness and zeal.
They won their first tournament at Lawrenceville, near Princeton, and came in second at their next, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Ultimately, they would come two wins shy of winning the Mid-Atlantic championships, and Flowy would be selected to the All-Regional First Team. A referee pulled him aside one weekend and told him that if he was interested, he could pull strings to put Flowy on track for a scholarship to UMass. On the nights in motels between the games, the boys—with Hrvoje now a part of their group—would drink and smoke, listen to music, and play spades deep into the night before playing their hearts out the following day. During the week, they would practice until after six, watch game film at Coach Ridley’s house until eight, go to Curtis’s house and study until ten, at which point Mrs. Gamble would drop each of them back at his home. When she’d first begun doing this, Flowy had asked her to let him off on South Orange Avenue, a well-trafficked thoroughfare, rather than enter the narrower, darker side streets of his neighborhood on 18th Avenue. She’d told him not to be silly; she’d lived in East Orange for over three decades and knew how to check her mirrors.
At school, they began working with college guidance counselors—even Tavarus, who in two years had raised his 0.7 GPA to 2.1. Flowy was extremely aware of the financial realities that lay between him and something like college—which, unlike St. Benedict’s, could not be paid for with a few hundred dollars’ worth of Social Security each month—but that referee’s voice made a resonant echo in his head: scholarship, scholarship, scholarship. Curtis, the only one whose parents had gone to college, was already listing party schools, particularly in Atlanta; Morehouse appealed to him. And Rob was thinking about Seton Hall, eight blocks from his home and his mother. His counselor told him that he should apply wherever he wanted to apply—that with Rob’s grades and his leadership accolades (not to mention a combined SAT score of 1510 out of 1600, placing him in the ninety-ninth percentile nationally), it couldn’t hurt to visit a few of the top-tier schools, if only to see what they looked like. The school organized and paid for these visits, which would begin the following summer before senior year. Rob went ahead and signed up for the Ivy League tour; he didn’t take the prospect seriously, but he would travel anywhere given the free opportunity.
Junior year, as the Burger Boyz would remember it, ended with a party. Rob walked the mile to Curtis’s house, where Tavarus and Flowy met up with them. They took a few hits of weed together and then all walked west as the sky darkened, their crew looking the same as any other group of young men trolling around East Orange that night. They said hey to anyone they passed, people they knew and people they didn’t. They smoked continuously and drank from brown-bagged bottles of Cisco wine, past the Seton Hall campus and into South Orange, where the wide streets curved beneath blooming cherry blossom trees and the green lawns were lit by yellow lights embedded in the mulched gardens. They ended up at Columbia High, the public school servicing this wealthy area. Rob’s friend from Mt. Carmel, Jason Delpeche, went to school here and had invited them to a dance. Drew met them in the gymnasium. There were supposed to be girls there. The Burger Boyz tended to do well with girls.
Except tonight’s party sucked: a few dozen kids pressed against the wall of a cavernous gym, with parent chaperones eyeing those who ventured to dance too closely. They couldn’t believe that they’d walked three miles to be there and would have to walk three miles home. Curtis made a call from the lobby pay phone and learned of a party down the street, at some kind of dance studio, so the five of them took off. They didn’t realize they were being followed until a hundred yards later. Back in East Orange, trailing footsteps would cause the backs of their necks to tingle in apprehension, their eyes to begin scanning for an alley down which to escape. But behind them now, almost all the Columbia High students were walking as if in formation, just as the freshmen had done on the Appalachian Trail, confident that Rob, Curtis, Tavarus, Flowy, and Drew would lead them somewhere they all wanted to be.
They landed at the next party and immediately became its center, cluster-dancing in slow motion under strobe lights, surrounded by girls, sneaking outside for hits of marijuana, feeling the excited beating of their own hearts as the culmination of the last three years together, three years that had formed them somehow, without any of them being aware. In the fall of 1994, they’d been boys, followers of other boys. Now, in the spring of 1997, they were young men, leaders who had earned the right to strut the way they did. And three, ten, twenty years from now? On that night, they were confident, even arrogant, that they would rule the city of Newark.
Chapter 5
COACH RIDLEY STOOD across from the seething, wild-eyed boy as their last volley of charged words ricocheted off the tiles of the pool. He couldn’t believe this was happening, that he’d allowed what had been intended to be a quiet, sensible conversation to reach this pitch—and at seven in the morning no less.
St. Benedict’s opened its pool to the neighboring public in the mornings, mostly city employees swimming a few laps before work. Rob had been lifeguarding for a small wage his junior and senior years, which meant getting to school no later than five thirty to open up the pool.
Coach Ridley had figured that this early, quiet hour would be as good a time as any to broach a topic that had been bothering him for many weeks now, and so he’d waited for all the swimmers to finish, leaving Rob alone to close down the pool. As the boy went about his succession of tasks—spooling in the lane ropes, stowing away the kickboards—Coach Ridley approached and asked Rob outright why he smoked so much marijuana, why he would jeopardize his lungs, his mind, his future that way. His intention was to have a reasonable conversation in the manner that St. Benedict’s teachers were trained to confront their students’ out-of-school lives: nothing accusatory, nothing tense, nothing to drive a boy farther away. But Coach Ridley—though he’d spent so many hundreds of hours in this very same chamber with Rob, though he’d taught the kid to swim, though he’d opened his own home so the Burger Boyz could study film—had no idea of the vast reservoir of anger within Rob Peace. And somehow his very earnest questions about Rob’s drug use had fully loosed this anger.
Now Coach Ridley was standing there, his own temples pumping with blood, hearing Rob scream, “I haven’t had a father since I was seven years old! What makes you think I need one now?”
This was the first time Coach Ridley had ever heard the kid mention his father. He replied, “I’m not trying to be your father, Rob. I just care about you.”
But Rob was already stalking out of the pool, his bare feet slapping the wet tiles. During his five years of teaching, Coach Ridley had never lost control of an interaction so completely. Rob didn’t
show up at water polo practice for the rest of the week.
At St. Benedict’s, academics represented only a fraction of the faculty’s responsibilities. Test scores were in many ways secondary to the task of instilling confidence in kids not primed to believe in themselves and confronting rampant emotional issues resulting from the loss of a parent, usually a father. The school’s emphasis on sports went a long way, particularly rarefied sports like water polo, fencing, and lacrosse. The expansive counseling system was a fundamental part of the curriculum, as well as the teacher rotation—without overtime pay—that kept the school’s doors open on weekends to students seeking a quiet place to work away from harried homes. But there remained limits to what infrastructure could accomplish, because the biggest mistake a counselor could make in addressing emotional problems was to call attention to those problems outright. In troubled cases, the key was to locate a tangential entry point, something like a back door through which counseling could be administered without the boy feeling as though he needed extra help.
The first telltale sign of difficulty at home tended to be academic: a disengagement with the classroom and subsequent falling grades. While heartbreaking to watch, this process presented a tangible opportunity to find that back door—as had been the case with Tavarus freshman year, when the Maine retreat had successfully aligned his touchy consciousness with the potential he’d forgotten he had.
But there were the rare students bright enough to maintain high grades no matter what they were struggling with internally. As Coach Ridley learned that early winter morning of 1998, Rob Peace was one of those students. All the anger Rob felt—at his father’s imprisonment, his mother’s weariness, his own poverty that tasted like ketchup packets—only seemed to fuel his merits as a scholar and leader, and hide itself behind those ever-rising attributes.