The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  “Do I owe you any money?” I asked.

  “For, like, two half hits?” He laughed. “Nah, it’s on the house.” (His tone implied that this would be the last freebie.)

  “I guess I thought it would be more mellow or something,” I replied.

  “It’s like your running. You just gotta train and you’ll get there.”

  My running, which had consumed every afternoon and the bulk of my weekends throughout college, had gotten me little more than a recurring hamstring pull that had long since nullified all my lofty hopes for record setting. The injury had also made me something of a basket case, logging each nutrient that went into my body, obsessing about sleep, living in terror of “speed-endurance” practices, and overthinking races to the point where my muscles would tighten and the bad hamstring would twinge and my mind, rather than focus on the rather simple task of running forward as fast as possible, would collapse into uncertainty as my opponents ran on ahead. These stresses accounted for probably half of my waking thoughts for three years of my life. So, though my first pot experience was more or less pathetic and I wasn’t impelled to retry anytime soon, loosening up a bit felt like a positive thing to do. More positive still was the experience of sharing this small, vital aspect of my friend’s life.

  After a time, we all seemed to calm down and focus once again—­particularly the premed students staring down the barrel of the MCAT. In many ways, this test was the culmination of all the studying, lab work, and anxiety that had accompanied their chosen career path: five hours that would decide what caliber of medical schools would consider them. These students disappeared for days at a time to study, take Kaplan courses and practice tests, and seek out any datum of information that might give them an advantage over the thousands of future doctors with whom they would be competing that day. These students resembled parents of infant triplets: bleary-eyed, beaten down, weakly managing to put a positive spin on the undertaking. Ty would score 44 out of a possible 45, placing him in the hundredth percentile nationally.

  Even the science majors who were not planning on medical school tended to take the exam in order to at least retain the option, but Rob did not. When asked about what he wanted to do with his degree, he would change the subject to Rio. He didn’t plan this trip so much as dream of it; he seemed to believe he could simply board a plane, bank over the ocean and land among those hills, then wing it from there. I wondered about his seeming lack of post-Yale motivation, and yet his “chillness” aligned so naturally with who he was that I never questioned it, and certainly not aloud to him. “Rob will figure it out,” those of us who knew him would say to each other. “He always does.” None of us—not even Oswaldo Gutierrez—knew then what we know now: that he had netted just over $100,000 selling marijuana at Yale. A small portion of this he’d already given to his mother in installments akin to the money he’d once left on the counter, small enough that she didn’t question him when he told her it came from the dining hall job he’d quit long before. He’d spent $10,000 or so on school supplies and summer travel. He set aside another $30,000, also for his mother, that he could give to her when he had a real job and wouldn’t have to bend believability to explain where it came from. The remaining half, “fifty large” in Rob’s parlance, was to pay for Rio and float him through the next year, at which point he was confident that he would in fact “figure it out.”

  I’M STILL NOT sure why, but my entire academic curriculum senior year revolved around the literary “search for the father” motif. In a prestigious class taught by the literature scholar Harold Bloom, I wrote my final paper on Odysseus and Telemachus, arguing that while the son searched for the father, the father was really searching for himself. (Professor Bloom gave the paper a C-, with a single comment scrawled on page 1: “This isn’t Homer, it’s Hobbs!”) My senior thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses triangulated Stephen Dedalus, his biological father, Simon Dedalus, and his surrogate father, Leopold Bloom, in an attempt to parse through the symbolic importance of blood. My final project in the creative writing tie-in to my English major was a novel, written quickly and quite poorly, about a carpenter in northern New England who, in the wake of his son’s death, sets off to locate the father who abandoned him, encountering thinly veiled characters plucked from the Odyssey along the way. None of these projects was original in the slightest, and indeed the subjects had been explored more deftly by innumerable writers before me (meaning: my work was entirely derivative). Combined, they probably totaled 150,000 words, and on these words I worked hours each night, usually with Homer or Joyce or both open beside me.

  “How do you just sit there and write shit?” Rob asked. A popular new Nelly CD was playing. Rob’s musical tastes seemed to have softened over time, and in the room I’d been hearing fewer freestyle-based, full-throttle gangster rappers like Ludacris and more melodic, overproduced songs like the one we were hearing now, “Ride Wit Me.”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I just like words, and kind of figuring them out.”

  Rob knew that I aspired to be a novelist. And without having read any of the lousy short fiction I’d produced over the years, and without telling me as much, he had confidence that I’d be able to do it, certainly more confidence than any jowly, prattling English professor or jaded, overcompetitive creative writing student. The ugliness of the creative writing track evidenced itself in everything from the sample stories you had to submit for entry into the most notable authors’ classes to the way every one of those professors smugly advised us during the first class to “choose a different career” and the shared understanding that if you could not speak fluidly at length about Raymond Carver’s canon, then you would never succeed. On a fellowship application, under a “career plan” entry, I’d written, “Write books of a mythical nature.” The selection committee had practically laughed me out of the room.

  Rob’s confidence was communicated with a simple look that said, If you want to, and you don’t, then that’s on you.

  “How the hell can you memorize every fact in every textbook?” I asked him in reply.

  “Not about memorization,” he said and looked up thoughtfully. “It’s like, you look at that stereo, or a clock, or whatever, and you would want to write a paragraph describing it. Me, I look at things and want to figure it out. Like, take it apart, see what’s inside it, know how it works, learn the science behind it.”

  “You’re like that with people, too,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re really curious about people’s stories. Like you’re always trying to ‘figure everyone out.’”

  “I suppose,” he replied.

  Later in the same conversation, he asked me why I was so obsessed with the Odyssey. He’d read it in high school and knew the story and themes, but he’d found the text stiff and inaccessible.

  “Just all the father-son stuff,” I replied. “I think about that all the time.”

  “How come?”

  “I guess it comes from stuff with my own dad.”

  “He seems like a real cool pop.”

  While struggling to find a way to explain the grievances I had over my father (unfounded, self-gratifying grievances to be sure, being as my father was steady, generous, and devoted to his children almost beyond reason), I remembered where Rob’s own father was. Skeet was mentioned so rarely in our room—maybe three times over four years—that forgetting was easy, and remembering made my search for words all the more treacherous.

  “He just doesn’t show or say much about what he feels. He’s kind of internalized. And I care more about what he thinks of me than pretty much anyone else. So, y’know, it’s something that’s on my mind a lot.”

  “Yeah, I see that,” he said, situating his textbook in his lap and pointing his face toward it again.

  “Do you think about . . . that stuff?” I said. “With your dad? I mean, I know it’s a lot different, b
ut . . . ?” Immediately, I regretted these words.

  “I guess,” he replied. “I don’t really know the man, so it’s different. Mostly, I think about my ma . . .” The conversation tapered off.

  Spring term brought with it a flighty, giddy feeling. Final exams still had to be dealt with—but we were here, we had made it. Now all those “lasts” were truly occurring: last snowfall, last “P is for the P in Pierson College” chants, last Spring Fling concert on Old Campus. Ty and I realized that, although Rob usually came to our home track meets, we had never seen him play water polo. He had been voted captain by his teammates both junior and senior years—a rarity on any sports team—but our knowledge of his sport remained limited to the team photo we found laying haphazardly on the coffee table one afternoon. In the picture, he stood left of center with his chest puffed out in a line of otherwise pale bodies, his face set to convey toughness.

  We drove to a tournament at Middlebury College one early Sunday morning, both of us hungover from the previous night. We wandered around the pretty campus until someone was able to direct us toward the pool. We joked about the skimpy swimsuits and rubber helmets for a minute, then half slept through a game before Yale played. Seeing Rob in the water brought us out of this stupor. We were so used to him being subdued and removed—so used to him being stoned, in fact—that to see the energy he possessed in the pool reminded me of a predatory animal, like his python, Dio, once a mouse was dropped into the tank. Our eyes were locked on him, waiting to see what he would do. He did not possess the languid, long-limbed aquatic grace of Olympic swimmers; his strokes were short, choppy, inefficient. But he moved, and when he took the ball he placed it bobbing in the water between his arms, controlling it with his chest and head as he swam the length of the pool. When preparing for a shot, his kicking legs held half his torso out of the water, the ball cradled in his palm still higher above his head and making rapid half rotations back and forth as he sought the right angle. We could hear the smack talk ten rows up in the bleachers: “Nah! Nah! You ain’t got shit!” when he was defending a ball holder; “Here it comes, bitch!” when he was keen to score. He released these gems in a low yet resounding hiss, his teeth bared, his grin scary. That he was the only black player, from what we could tell, in the whole eight-team tournament only heightened the thrashing quality to every movement he made, every word he used to intimidate. He played with his elbows bent and often deployed toward a forehead or jaw. When he was whistled for a foul—which was often—he’d raise his arms out of the water in mystification, like a petulant NBA player. From above, Ty and I egged him on, fully absorbed in his joy, which was total.

  Less joyful was the “bio” Rob gave to Elihu a few weeks before graduation. The bio was the fundamental element of the secret society tradition: in any medium you chose and over any length of time you needed, you gave your life story to the eleven classmates with whom you’d been spending two nights a week throughout senior year. You were supposed to dig deep and challenge yourself, as well as place complete trust in the listeners to keep everything confidential. The Elihu Class of ’02 had been atypically diverse in a socioeconomic sense, with a disproportionate number of minority kids who’d come to Yale from poverty. Giving a bio could be stressful; one felt an inherent pressure to “tell a story,” and in order to do so, construct conflict, which was harder for some than for others. When, during the winter, a girl had gone on at length about the social stresses of the Dalton School—an expensive prep school on which the TV show Gossip Girl was based—a poor student from Chicago had begun to seethe, to the point of interrupting her and pointing out that these were not problems, not “real” ones, anyway. The girl had become defensive; this was her bio, and an important safety net in giving it was the understanding that judgments would be suspended. But still, a kind of class warfare erupted as the group split into sides: the poor kids aligned in taking offense at having to sit through five hours’ worth of “rich people problems,” and the well-off kids maintaining that problems were relative and the girl should be permitted—and encouraged—to share the issues that weighed on her. Rob stayed out of the fray, as he stayed out of most of the conflicts that had occurred in the Elihu house. But on that night, he came to be regarded as the final authority on the matter, since his circumstances growing up had been the most “real” of any.

  “Just let her talk,” he said, sipping his brandy as if for dramatic effect. And then, to the kids who’d been hassling her, “Damn, it’s like you people can’t just listen without trying to start shit.”

  “You people?”

  “You heard what I said. You’re acting like you’re all the same, so that’s how I’ll address you.”

  “That’s fucked-up, Rob.”

  “And it’s fucked-up the way you’re treating her, like she’s not an individual, either.” Then, to the girl, “Proceed.”

  As Rob’s bio approached, the Elihu house filled with genuine curiosity. He’d always been content to drink the free booze and smoke up the house but reluctant to engage in any of the meaningful personal debate that the secret society was intended to prompt. They figured he would keep it short and focus mainly on his mother. He might touch on racism at Yale or something controversial like that, just to see how everyone would react.

  They did not expect that he would talk for four full hours about a part of him they’d previously heard nothing of: his father.

  Seated at the head of a long oak table, speaking with no notes or pictures, he told them about his mother’s unique filial strategy, the nights spent doing homework, the days spent wandering around the neighborhood. He told them about the fire on Pierson Street, the apartment on Chestnut, the wide orbit of men his father maintained. He told them about the trial, the prison visits, the successful appeal and its reversal. He told them about the letters he continued to send to various appellate judges every month. He painted the broad picture of a great man egregiously wronged by a system engineered against “people like him,” and he walked the Elihu society through the day of August 8, 1987, as if he’d been an omniscient observer over everyone involved—the Moore sisters, the police, and the prosecutors. He spent a lot of time focusing on the murder weapon and how his father owned it because you had to carry a piece if you were “about that life.” But the real murderer had broken into his father’s apartment in 2E, stolen his weapon, used it to murder the Moore sisters in 2D, and then returned it to 2E. The police had then illegally removed the gun from the scene to plant on his father, so that the case could be closed quickly and spare them the trouble of having to actually do their jobs. For the entire year, Rob had placed himself above petty class conflicts that had plagued many of their discussions. On that night he made clear to his secret society that the fundamental conflict of his life was founded on precisely that belief: the white establishment would always keep the common black man down in order to cover their own asses.

  Arthur Turpin had become close to Rob that year. An affluent student with an aristocratic way about him, he and Rob had passed many Thursday nights playing pool and having fun with their contrasting personas—in other words, they “fucked with each other.” Arthur had always been troubled by the anger he sensed in Rob. Though he hid that anger well behind the grin and the laughter and the marijuana, Arthur felt it in the jokes Rob made to Laurel and others about their privileged upbringings, in his heavy quietude whenever socioeconomic topics came up in conversation, and in his general disdain of Yale and Yalies. Arthur saw a closed-mindedness that was, he felt, self-propagating and innately limiting. More broadly, he believed these qualities explained precisely how an intelligent guy like Rob would always make life harder on himself than it needed to be. Here he was, drinking brandy in a prestigious society in a top-ranked school, the beneficiary of so many gifts both natural and bestowed, surrounded by bright and open-minded classmates, and yet still he remained mired in, even paralyzed by, what was effectively his own racism. Of course, Arthur
never broached the subject with Rob, since it was easier to screw around instead. He’d made assumptions about his friend that were treacherous to air out, the central one being the most common: you truly can’t shed your roots.

  On the night of Rob’s bio, Arthur realized that those roots were embedded far deeper than he ever could have imagined. He felt very sad for his friend that night, listening to Rob arduously construct his own defense of his father, the defense he believed Skeet was deprived of fifteen years ago, a defense that came with its own many loose ends. Rob was able to intellectualize almost every argument that arose, but where Skeet Douglas was concerned, each word of the thousands Rob spoke came from a deeply, dangerously emotional place. In truth, even after all the hours he’d spent in Trenton State talking to Skeet about it, Rob seemed to have no idea where his father was or what he was doing on that morning. Arthur found it quite obvious that until Rob was able to place his father that day long ago, he’d have a hell of a time trying to place himself here, now.

  I’D BEEN CONFUSED by Rob’s vague plan following graduation, and why it seemed to center on a twenty-two-year-old Yale graduate living with his mother in a poor neighborhood.

  Then I visited him in East Orange that spring, during the reading week that preceded final exams. I was en route to Manhattan to visit my brother, and the side trip to East Orange was a statement of sorts: I’d realized that though I’d offered dozens of times to take him out to dinner with my visiting family or even take him home with me for a weekend, never once had I proposed doing something where he came from. I didn’t tell my parents about the visit; I could just hear my mom saying, “Be careful.”

  Rob picked me up at the train station and acted as a tour guide. He drove me past St. Benedict’s Prep, Branch Brook Park, Schools Stadium, and ultimately to a cookout at his Aunt Debbie’s apartment. What was unnerving about Newark, as we moved west and the hospitals and colleges and greens of downtown gave way to graffiti, grit, and loiterers, was how cemented the poverty seemed to be, unfolding in all directions, like the ocean going on and on, never-ending. Despite the progressive motivations that had prompted the visit, I did feel tense as it became apparent that I might be the only white person within three miles. And yet, with Rob at the wheel, waving to people in the street and attaching childhood stories to practically every corner, the neighborhood didn’t feel like a slum. Its streets were dirty, run-down, very poor, and very black, but they didn’t feel threatening, not sitting next to Rob. As we crossed into East Orange proper, I was attuned to the way he leaned back in the driver’s seat, one arm slung out the window, skully knotted tightly, bass thumping. He was at ease.