by Jeff Hobbs
However, Rob was incredibly skilled at not showing how he felt.
He was also skilled at concealing who he was and who he wanted to be. In high school, he had been all things: an athlete, a leader, an academic, a partier. In college, he went about his days so very quietly, slipping in and out of the room with a head nod and a “’Sup,” his canvas book bag slung over his shoulder—the same book bag his father had bought him for Oakdale, scuffed and threadbare, which he’d taken everywhere in the neighborhood to Newark-proof himself. At meals, he usually sat alone near the entrance, at a small round table just behind the station where Jacinta Johnson, one of the dining hall ladies, swiped our ID cards. Jacinta was an overweight, light-skinned, red-haired African American woman in her forties who had a grandmotherly aspect. Rob usually kept a textbook open in front of him but he talked to her over his shoulder, and he made her laugh a lot. When I sat with him sometimes, his reserved demeanor and the open textbook elicited the question, “Is it cool if I sit here?” as if I might be intruding on intensive study or simply a desire to be alone—which was a desire that I myself valued highly, as solitude could be hard to find in college. He would shrug and say sure, and his dialogue with Jacinta would continue as he paged through the textbook and I opened a paperback from a Shakespeare’s tragedies or romantic poetry class, King Lear or Wordsworth. During that time, I didn’t know him well but I appreciated the quietude that surrounded him. Any other table in the dining hall carried the threat of having to perform for new acquaintances, to prove how clever or worldly or socially connected you were in the context of conversations about foreign policy, Ptolemy, the best bars on campus. With Rob, there was no judging, no need to hone any aspects of personality or tout knowledge. I could just sit, read, maybe joke about our roommate Ty’s weird sleeping hours and weirder culinary routines (he would eat half a dozen microwave soy burgers at midnight, run five miles, and then go to the library until seven). An added benefit came with knowing that no one else would venture to sit with us, both because Rob always chose the smallest table and because our classmates still kept their distance. I hailed from a small school and a small town, and the social onslaught had been intimidating. Rob provided a buffer of which I, selfishly and without truly asking if I was welcome, took advantage.
Then he met Zina. I wasn’t privy to their brief courtship, or really to any part of Rob’s social life. From my perspective, one day our dorm room was what any dorm room shared by four eighteen-year-old males was: a shambles of clashing furniture and clothes and books, but habitable and generally peaceful. The next day, this girl was camped out on our futon (which she’d folded out into bed mode, such that it took up half the common room) along with half her possessions. And she was not just any girl. Everything about her—her towering bun of coiled hair, her skirts that ballooned around her sprawled legs, her various moisturizers and conditioners, her high and ceaseless voice—consumed space and oxygen. She was a senior from Jamaica, and though she had an off-campus apartment she took up residence on the fourth floor of Lanman-Wright Hall, such that she seemed to be there at all hours, even when Rob was not. I observed from this too-close vantage point as, over a span of less than a month, they succumbed to the dating tendency common among college students—they behaved as though they were married.
I’d already observed this among others in our class: with college just weeks old, a few couples had formed who ate breakfast together in their sweatpants while reading the Yale Daily News, clasped hands while walking across the quad between classes, held court during dinner as if this were their home and they were hosting a society party, studied in adjacent library cubicles, and planned their weekends solely around each other. I could easily see why this happened; we were on our own for the first time, and people wanted to feel like legitimate adults. And then, in almost every case, the inevitable parting happened, impelled by the realization that they were not in fact adults, that codependence actually impinged on these precious four years of freedom. For those on the outside looking in, the subsequent breakup always presented good fodder for speculation (as the newness of college began to wane that semester, so did the compulsion to discuss “serious” topics, replaced by that old reliable: gossip).
Rob and Zina were different, carrying something more consequential in their dynamic that precluded gossip and left one only to watch, often bewildered. They fought all the time. As in a marriage, their fights began with little things (our messy room, him not calling when he said he would, etc.) that escalated into big things (suspicions of cheating, he being fundamentally an asshole, she being fundamentally a bitch, etc.). Because Zina had neither pitch control nor self-awareness about being overheard, Dan and Ty and I were privy to these fights with an intimacy none of us desired (I soon began to study in the library). They sounded scripted, like the domestic arguments policemen overhear in TV procedurals before they burst into a project housing drug den.
“Robert, you just smoke and eat your face off and don’t do nothing,” she yelled at him. She was in her spot in the common room; he was in his bedroom, with a door closed between them.
“Shut up, I’m trying to read.”
“You’re not reading! You’re just sitting there all fucked up in your pigsty room!”
Rob said what I, overhearing from my top bunk, had been wanting to say for quite some time (Zina nagged me about the mess, too): “You think the room’s too messy, get the fuck out and go back to your own room.”
And so on.
I asked him once, with carefully premeditated phrasing, “What do you and Zina do for fun?” Meaning: Why are you with this woman?
In response, he showed me a leather jacket he’d been wearing lately—real leather, and the only possession of his that he seemed to take good care of, always folded and hung. I hadn’t realized that it had been a gift from Zina. He said, “She’s a real woman, not like these other Yalie bitches.” Then he laughed and brought out the Facebook (this was before Facebook.com; the Facebook was a paperback room listing of the entire freshman class, with head shots, that boys spent hours combing through with highlighters to note those they would like to sleep with, realistically or not). Rob had marked a handful of pictures, not for himself but for me. The “Freshman Screw” dance was coming up that weekend, in which one’s roommates arranged your date for the night. “Which one you into?” he asked.
I looked over his listings and happily saw that he’d taken the task seriously, and the girls he had in mind for me were by and large attractive. After I ranked them, we huddled over the book together for the benefit of our other two roommates. Rob had it in his mind to “screw” Ty by setting him up with a less-than-desirable face.
Rob and Ty got along well. They were both taking intro biology together, the precursor to premed classes. Like Rob—like almost all the students now surrounding us—Ty was a fantastic student accustomed to straight A’s in high school. Unlike Rob, he was tremendously competitive and pulled all-nighters with a particular pride, intent on being at the top of the class. Rob, who was laid back about schoolwork, had no problem with Ty’s academic approach. Rob’s problem had to do with the “thug” persona that Ty nurtured with near-equal intensity. He wore a heavy jacket with FUBU (an acronym of “For Us, By Us,” alluding to black people) printed in huge red letters across the chest, and he came to be referred to as “T-Money,” or, as he signed off on his emails, “T$.” He talked “hard” and seemed to loop every other story about high school around to some fight he’d been in, some girl he’d slept with, some bad neighborhood he’d hung out in. Ty had grown up in the suburbs and spent money freely. He bought new clothes frequently to the point that they burst out of our shared closet and onto every hangable ledge (including the FUBU jacket, which Rob told me cost upward of $300, noting that the “For Us” part of the slogan did not apply to poor black people), and he ate a lot of take-out food from the overpriced delis on Elm Street, because the dining hall food—already p
aid for in his tuition, roughly $25 per day—was unappealing. He considered himself quite the ladies’ man, kept his shirts ironed and his Tommy Hilfiger cologne stocked. Obsessed with his physique, his desk was rowed with industrial-size containers of GNC products like creatine and whey protein powder; he sometimes lifted weights in the Pierson gym at three in the morning. He was friendly and funny, but he was all but incapable of daily chores like laundry, bathing, disposing of half-eaten soy burgers (squirrels began sneaking into our common room for leftovers). Rob, who had been responsible for his own household since 1987, didn’t like it. So when Ty was pounding his chest about someone who’d “punked” him and who had a “beatdown” coming his way, Rob just laughed and said, “T, we both know you ain’t gonna do shit, so quit fronting.”
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 constant 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.”
PARENTS’ WEEKEND 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 memor
ials 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.”