by Jeff Hobbs
While the rest of us toured our parents around campus that weekend, energetic with pride as we key-carded our way through the gated archways leading into catered buffets and ultimately congregating at the football field for the weekend’s game, Rob sat on the porch and smoked cigarettes with Jackie before making the rounds of old friends. He stopped by St. Benedict’s to have lunch with Friar Leahy and observe an off-season water polo shoot-around, giving in to the impulse to bark commands at the players. His Ivy League association caused him to be treated by former classmates, kids he’d led on the Appalachian Trail, as a conquering hero. After that, he visited his father at Essex County and, most likely, got up to speed on the appeal situation. By that time in early November, Skeet was still standing by while Carl Herman submitted the long succession of preliminary documents, many of them recycled from the successful PCR hearing. They were accustomed to the administrative lag times by now, but the waits carried a more expansive kind of anxiety than either of them had before known; in Skeet’s and Rob’s eyes, the man had been freed, his conviction overturned on no less an authority than the Constitution of the United States, and yet here they were again, battling the legal army of a state-sponsored apparatus that seemed intensely focused on keeping him imprisoned.
My own father had been sending me letters, which arrived in my post office box each Thursday. He’d made this effort for my two older siblings during their first semesters at Yale. Dad was not the most emotive man, and he wrote these messages on small yellow Post-its, a few illegible sentences along the lines of, Hope your classes aren’t too bad and practice is going well. Grandma came over for dinner on Sunday. Mom made lasagna. Hang in there. Dad. Attached by a paper clip would be a small news article from the local paper about my high school football team. As the weeks went on, the meaning of these letters evolved from nostalgic to something more powerful. They became the primary, tangible reminder that home still existed. While I moved through the trials and tribulations of this much-hyped college experience, the inconsistent loops and falls of my dad’s handwriting still took minutes-per-word to decipher and my mom still made lasagna when Grandma came over. The world might be big and layered, but my life within it was small, secure, rooted in old simplicity.
Marijuana, I believe, served the same function for Rob: a bridge, spanning far more distance than my own, between the world he’d come from and the world he found himself in. I had no idea how much he smoked, and just like he had in his mother’s house, he hid it well. He smelled more thickly of chlorine from water polo practice (the initiation for which had found him wearing a toga in the middle of the Commons dining hall, singing “Express Yourself” by Madonna) than he ever did of weed. He never smoked in the room. Scents could not cling to his leather jacket. He seemed zoned out fairly often, crouched over a textbook with the TV on and music playing loud, but I just figured that was a quirk: in order to focus he needed to create an excess of noise to shut out. Track practice was year-round, so Ty and I were catching the three o’clock shuttle bus out to the athletic complex a mile from campus, where we spent the fall running endless wind sprints across a grass intramural field, known as the Flats, that stretched a quarter mile toward a hillside of fiery autumnal leaves. We trained for two hours and then took the bus back to the campus gymnasium to lift weights for another hour, then had dinner before returning to the dorm around seven to work. These were four hours every day during which we were completely checked out from the campus, loosening our bodies from our minds—and four hours that, I later learned, Rob spent getting high with a new group of friends who lived off campus, doing pretty much the same thing.
People called it the Weed Shack: a two-story clapboard house on Temple Street, two blocks west of campus proper. Sherman Feerick, a junior, was the leaseholder, and four or five others lived there with him. Sherman had grown up in Montclair and been a football star. He was an intelligent talker, and he talked nonstop. When he’d first met Rob, he’d said, “So you’re the new one,” meaning the single token poor African American male Newarker admitted to Yale each year. The two men were drawn to one another, the way Newarkers living outside Newark tended to be. Their shared knowledge of the very particular milieu made for a strong bond, and so did the fact that Sherman consumed—and sold—weed. After his conversation with Flowy about possibly selling on campus, Rob ran the idea past Sherman, out of a respect more than a desire to have questions answered. Rob told him that Charles Cawley sent the tuition checks directly to the school, but that didn’t account for books and lab equipment, which approached the level of his entire high school tuition. He told him that his mom was in bad shape—tired, poor, and now alone. He shrugged casually and said he could use a little money. And Sherman, rather than feel like his own earnings were threatened, began steering a little business Rob’s way, just like Rob had done for Tavarus in high school. He schooled him on how to stay under the university’s radar, which was practically effortless as long as you weren’t stupid.
Rob became a fixture in the Weed Shack’s living room, where a bong or a joint was perennially lit and shared by whoever happened to be hanging there. Those sunken couches and scavenged chairs provided a safe haven for students to get stoned and say what they really felt about Yale, about Yalies, about the Yale Experience. Their criticisms could get acidic, coalescing into a kind of groupthink that—for Sherman, at least, looking back years later—went far beyond what the actual reality merited. That a Yale education was a rare and coveted gift remained always a part of the big picture, but few things were easier for a group of young men to lose sight of than the big picture. Some of their grievances were common to the point of cliché: the school tailored itself toward rich kids, legacies, phonies; the financial aid packages were basically for good PR and entailed more paperwork than any 300-level class; the social hierarchy in place was more vapid than high school; the professors outsourced the actual teaching to TAs a few years older than the undergrads while they focused on their own research. Other complaints were more nuanced, invoking deeper, historical elements of the minority condition. PROP—the minority orientation week that Rob had not attended—had included seminars on how to take notes; “Like we need to learn how to hold a pencil,” Sherman said. The Af-Am House was hidden on a small footpath on the edge of campus, tucked away behind the Art & Architecture building on York Street, smaller and more remote than the cultural centers for Asians, Hispanics, Jews. The university proper refused to give any official sponsorship to the annual Af-Am Week, in which black students from all over New England came to campus for a long weekend of lectures and parties. This place, they collectively opined, was racist.
Rob, by all accounts, had never thought much about race. While he had painstakingly devised methods to navigate the different groups of people in his life, almost all of those people had been black. Uncharacteristically for the average black student coming to Yale, he’d never contemplated, let alone practiced, the fine intricacies of living in a socioeconomic atmosphere not his own. New friendships with people who railed against those intricacies—loudly, profanely—had him thinking about race very much. Typical of Rob Peace, though not of Sherman and the others, he did so intellectually rather than angrily.
“Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood,” he once said. “Now he’s in the minority—nobody wants him there, unless it’s to rob his ass—and more than anything he has to think about how to protect himself, how to get out. There’s no weaker situation to be in than that, and this boy isn’t getting anything productive done until he’s out, back among his own people. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Yale, for the first time in our lives we don’t have to worry about protecting ourselves. And we were all able to get enough shit done to be accepted here—so imagine what we can do when you take all the crazy hood shit out of the equation and we can just focus on the business at hand. So what if it’s annoying as hell? Instead of sitting around here bitching about it, maybe we just accept that it is w
hat it is, and know that we have the capacity to get way more from them than they’ll ever get from us.”
He took a mighty pull from the bong and sat back, eyes closed, exhaling a hypnotic plume of smoke into the air above him.
A weeklong Thanksgiving vacation was coming, which he would spend in reunion with the Burger Boyz. He would also meet Flowy’s connect so that he could bring back a few ounces of weed to sell in eighths to his classmates during the harried weeks preceding final exams. This he would do quietly, away from his own living space and invisibly to his roommates.
Chapter 7
A WINTER EVENING AT Yale could have a spectral quality. The untouched snow in the center of the Pierson College quad tamped the urban noise while brightening the halos cast by half a dozen gas lamps. On the bells of Harkness Tower, the Guild of Carillonneurs played the 1812 Overture. The students had for the most part retreated to their rooms, and each of the few hundred windows embedded in the brick façade emitted a warm light suggesting comfort, focus, and industry within. As I walked the thirty yards between the dining hall and entryway D—still faint from a track practice that had left me dry-heaving beneath the bleachers in Coxe Cage—it was easy to forget that we weren’t actually existing in the New England of colonial times, when these structures had in fact been built.
Our sophomore dorm room was less tranquil, looking as though a bomb composed of dirty laundry, CDs, and aluminum take-out food containers had detonated. I flicked on the lights, and Rob materialized out of the dark. He’d been sitting in a wooden chair in the far corner, head bowed, one hand hanging over his broad chest while the other picked at his frayed, newly grown cornrows. The room was thickly perfumed with incense. In a charged flurry one night a few weeks earlier, we’d written some of our favorite verses in permanent black marker on the white walls. One of my contributions had been the last line of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Above it, Rob had written a stanza from a Ludacris song that detailed having sex with a woman on the fifty-yard line of the Georgia Dome. Rob sat just beneath those lines, his exhalations audible and weighty. His dining hall uniform was unbuttoned over a ribbed sleeveless undershirt. His face was angled down and away but his body resembled a dark, clenched fist.
The second half of freshman year had passed uneventfully. We’d cemented our friend groups, grown accustomed to the academic cycle, and in some ways come to see this place as our home. Rob and Zina had broken up, and my initial urge to celebrate had been tempered by how truly depressed Rob had become in the weeks after. He’d begun working in the Pierson dining hall for $8 an hour in the spring of freshman year—starting in the dish room, same as Jackie—and when I came to eat he would take a break to sit with me behind Jacinta until she told him, smilingly, to get his ass back to work. While I had gone home for the summer to the same job I’d had in high school, Rob had remained in New Haven for the first half to work on the custodial staff during Yale’s reunion weekends, and then he’d spent the second half at home with Jackie and his friends. In June, Skeet’s postconviction relief had been overturned when the judge sided with the State’s counterappeal, and Rob had stood by while his father was transferred to Trenton State once again, a year and a half after Rob and Carl had walked out with him in December 1997.
These labors, duties, paychecks, and heartbreaks were six months of Rob’s life, and I knew little about most of them. What I did know was that the tentativeness with which I had first regarded him had faded, if not into total comfort then at least close enough. I knew that Rob had also, beginning with fall reading week and progressing through the winter and spring of freshman year, become one of the leading drug dealers on campus.
By this time, midway through our second year, I would typically come home to a mirthful tribal circle carved out of his bedroom—a safe haven for misfits and trendsetters alike to pass around a joint and download their days, Rob presiding with his trademark grin and barbed bons mots. Never before had I found him as I had now: alone and miserable and sitting wide-awake in the dark.
“Yo, Rob,” I said. He barely raised his reddened, watery eyes. “Everything cool?”
He mumbled some ambiguous syllable.
“You want the lights back off or . . . ?”
With true, unadulterated vitriol, he replied, “I just hate all these entitled motherfuckers.” He was talking more to himself than to me, as I was more or less one of those entitled motherfuckers. In other words: the majority of the Yale student body, clusters of them now passing back and forth in front of our first-floor window with their books and winter coats, the Ivy League version of the hustlers walking Chapman Street at night.
He picked up a physical chemistry textbook from the floor and began to read. And I retreated into my bedroom to spend a few hours in the Congo with Marlow in search of Kurtz. Aside from the audible friction of a page being turned, Rob gave little suggestion of life unfolding in the next room.
After a time, the chemistry textbook thumped closed and the TV came on: one of his beloved kung fu movies. I put my own book down and deferred the essay I was to start writing tonight in order to join him. He was watching a bootleg VHS of Snake in the Monkey’s Shadow, which he’d brought back from his last trip home along with a gallon-size ziplock packed with dry marijuana and orange rinds. The film—grainy and nonsensical, definitely not worth the $2 he’d paid for it—lightened his mood to the point that he asked me if it was okay for him to smoke. I nodded, and he lit up. He looked older and rougher when inhaling a joint, pinching it between thumb and index finger with the live end cupped in his palm, breathing in with fast intensity and out with painstaking slowness. Apropos of nothing, he said, “So you wanna know what happened?”
The incident had occurred in the dining hall, where Rob worked five nights a week. A group of guys on the crew team (that association implying that they were white, rich, and had landed at Yale by way of elite New England boarding schools) had stood up to leave without busing their trays to the window ten paces away. Rob had told them—courteously, he wanted me to be sure—to take care of their trays so he could wipe off the table, which itself had been left a crumby, puddled mess. The guys had mumbled something about being in a rush and kept walking, leaving plates heaped with half-eaten food for Rob to dispose of. They probably hadn’t realized that he was a student. They failed to say thank you to him or any other staff workers on their way out.
Each rendered detail accumulated in the telling and restoked Rob’s ire: the disrespect, the avoidance of eye contact, the smirks, the preppy clothes, the slovenly mess, the food haphazardly wasted, the fact that these guys had no doubt forgotten the interaction the moment they’d passed by Jacinta and exited the dining hall to begin their nights—a keg party at the Zeta Psi house, presumably, since it was Thursday and that was what the crew team did on Thursdays. And Rob, in his starched white uniform and with a hairnet over his cornrows, had stood over the remnants of their dinners and watched them leave. Beneath the tall portraits of prominent alumni, the dining hall was bright with talk and laughter, rendering him helpless to do what he wanted to do, what most any of his neighborhood friends from Newark would have done: pin each of them facedown on the hardwood floor and stomp the backs of their heads until their teeth popped out—“curbing,” a process he had refused to explain to his mother but that he described in detail to me now, including the satisfying squelching sound of teeth relinquishing attachment to gums. I didn’t ask whether this portrait came from firsthand experience. He couldn’t even call them what later, to me, he would: motherfuckers. All he could do was bus the three trays, so that Jacinta or Roslyn or Jimmie—his colleagues and friends, full-time dining hall employees—wouldn’t have to. Then he’d put his fist through the wall in the dish room. He showed me the resultant swelling in three knuckles. I asked if he’d get in trouble for that, and he replied that one of the cooks had promised to patch up the hole with plaster before the mana
ger showed up, so Rob wouldn’t get fired.
I thought the story ended there, but Rob kept going, protracting these events into the future: his desire to find the guys, get them off campus, and carry out retribution away from the faculty overseers, blue-lit emergency phones, and campus police who maintained the pervading atmosphere of complete safety, even invincibility. Though he didn’t say so in words, he seemed intent on proving, to himself and to them, that no one was invincible—that, Yalie or not, anyone could and should be held to account for the kind of person he was. I got the sense that where he’d grown up, this wasn’t a matter of etiquette or debate.
“You . . . can’t do that, Rob,” I said, and he looked at me chagrined, his face saying, Why the hell not? My answer: “I mean, you just can’t.”
“I know, I know,” he finally said. “What, you thought I was serious?”
In fact, I had known he was.
I was still struggling to equate the irritating but unremarkable encounter he’d described (I had doubtlessly forgotten to bus my own tray once or twice, though I didn’t admit that now) with the profound anger still coursing through him, a few hours and a few joints later. I felt guilty for being unable to do so, for lacking the empathy required to connect a careless prep school slight to a fundamental flaw in the social construct in which we lived. All I said was, “That sucks, dude.”
He shook his head and smiled for the first time that night, a smile approaching the broad, remarkable grin that had come to characterize him on campus. He knew I could never understand, and he was kind enough not to hold my sheltered obliviousness against me. This had become the rhythm of our friendship at Yale: he would share with me the smallest fragment of his world and then step back into the whole of mine.