The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  The reception he received at the cookout—at least three dozen people packed into a small yard behind an apartment complex on Hamilton Avenue—was warm in a way I’d never experienced in my own WASP upbringing, where handshakes were followed by vague descriptions of “what’s new,” then dinner. Carl was there, as was Dante, and Rob’s cousins Nathan and Diandra and Corey. Rob was the mayor of this potluck gathering, but he deflected any awe directed toward him. His grandmother, Frances, was in a wheelchair with tubes in her nostrils; her emphysema had been worsening throughout Rob’s college years. Horace, beside her, looked very old and sullen behind a fixed smile. We stood by her wheelchair most of the afternoon as Rob asked everyone what was going on in the neighborhood, what was going on in their lives, offering small bits of advice to those having trouble at home or at work. One of his cousins mentioned that she was about to be kicked out of her apartment because she was $600 behind on rent. Rob took her aside, out of everyone’s earshot, and told her he would take care of it. “I got you,” he said. “Now give me a hug.”

  What struck me in particular was the amazement on display that not only was he graduating from Yale, but he was going to do so in four years. “Four years!” people kept exhaling disbelievingly, as if the typical time span for achieving a bachelor’s degree was unfathomable. “My man graduating Yale in four years . . .” Jackie was the only one present who didn’t seem ecstatic about Rob’s pending accomplishment. She sat in a lawn chair in the back of the yard, chain-smoking menthols. She looked much older than I remembered her on orientation day, the last time I’d seen her, more gray and with a harder jaw, and she was still hard to impress—not by the effort I’d taken to come here, not by the effort Rob had taken to make it through Yale. Looking back now, it is easy to feel as if she alone knew that success and happiness in life were more elusive even than an Ivy League diploma.

  Night had fallen by the time he took me back to the train station. He asked if I wanted to stop for something to eat in the Ironbound, at a Portuguese restaurant he loved. He told me how seedy Ferry Street had been not too long ago, and how its revival into a busy stretch of green and red restaurant awnings was miraculous. He used that word, “miraculous,” a word I’d never heard come out of his mouth before. I said I had to get to the city to meet my brother, and I knew that Rob was heading back to East Orange to see his “boys.” I also knew that he had to attend to the matter of re-upping his marijuana supply for graduation, which was going to be a boon for business. We slapped hands and I watched him aggressively pull his beater car into the traffic snarl that was Raymond Boulevard. Through the window, riding low, he looked serious all of a sudden, very grown-up.

  Nobody looked grown-up on graduation day. Much like orientation three and a half years earlier, the weekend was an endless succession of ceremonies and speeches, the lawns newly seeded for the trampling pleasure of graduates and their families, most of us in some level of drunkenness at all times. To begin, elected class representatives planted a symbolic ivy vine outside one of the classroom buildings, while a sentimental, student-written poem titled “Ivy Ode” was read aloud.

  On Class Day, the first of the two-day-long proceedings, we were each supposed to wear a hat that said something about ourselves. I sat next to Rob during the ceremony, and in front of us arose a three-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower from the head of a young woman, presumably of French extraction. Engineering students sported battery-powered alcohol distribution machines they’d designed. Rob, as ever, wore his skully over his cornrows. As the Class Day speaker, Governor George Pataki—on whose pool table Rob had passed out a year ago—took the stage before the twelve hundred giddy graduates and cracked his first weak joke of the afternoon, Rob hunched over to pack his white clay pipe with a pinch of marijuana and toke (these pipes had been given to us by the school, and we were supposed to break them underfoot at some point, symbolizing . . . something). Some kids around us laughed and asked for a hit; others scowled and said, “That’s so disrespectful,” in hissy whispers. Governor Pataki spoke gravely about 9/11, pleading that we not fall victim to ignorant intolerance. “Why did it take the worst act of terrorism to unite our country?” he asked rhetorically, fifty yards away. Later, our roommate Ty received the award for overall achievement out of the entire Class of ’02.

  Rob nudged my elbow and pointed to a wizard hat someone sported a few rows ahead, specked with small gold stars, like something Albus Dumbledore might wear for a Hogwarts commencement. He told me that Yale had often felt to him like the famous school for wizards: a place of Gothic spires and dark stone hallways set in another dimension, which granted access to its sorcery and secrets only to these elite few graduating with us right now.

  After the ceremony, Rob took Jackie to a cocktail party for parents at the Elihu house. He was excited to show Jackie the place. He’d explained what a secret society was, but the concept had always seemed to elude her: a house set aside exclusively for a dozen college students to drink booze in and share their lives twice a week when they should have been studying. She went with him, nodded her way through the tour, exchanged polite greetings with other students and parents before her lips fell by habit into the straight horizontal line that was neither a smile nor a frown. Red wine and aged whiskey were brought around by hired servers, but she didn’t drink.

  After the cocktails, most students dined with their families at upscale restaurants like the Chart House and Union League Cafe, or went to Mory’s for the “Cups” ritual—gigantic chalices of boozy punches were passed around a group, and whoever finished the last drop spun the chalice upside down on his or her head singing, “It’s [drinker’s name] who makes the world go round . . .” Rob took Jackie to Jacinta’s small apartment a mile up Whalley Avenue. I’d jogged through this downtrodden area often during my time at Yale, because it lay between campus and the track facilities, and I’d always kept my head down and didn’t stop. Jacinta lived there, between Whalley and Edgewood, with her teenage son. A week before, Yale’s black seniors had had their own graduation ceremony. This took place at the Af-Am House, and each student asked a family member, faculty adviser, or friend to drape a scarf around his or her neck onstage. Rob and Danny Nelson had argued over who would have Jacinta bestow his scarf, and ultimately Rob had ceded her to Danny, because Danny had worked in the dining hall all four years of college. Rob’s scarf was draped by the charismatic poet and sociology professor Derrick Gilbert, whose book of poetry, HennaMan, Rob had been obsessed with amid all his science courses. Tonight, Jacinta had a braised pork shoulder on the table. The four of them sat and ate. She and Jackie talked like old girlfriends, and throughout the evening Rob seemed tired but happy, his manner tinged with relief that these four years were over.

  But they were not over, not quite yet. We still had one more ceremony the next day, when the graduating seniors from Pierson College gathered in the college quad to receive our diplomas. We filed in from the slate patio on which we’d first gathered almost four years earlier. Then, Rob had been smoking a cigarette off to the side in his Timberland boots, looking older than the rest of us. He didn’t look that way anymore. Maybe in our matching navy gowns and tasseled hats, anyone would be hard-pressed to look very mature. Maybe the rest of us had caught up with him somehow, though I doubted that. Maybe we all knew him now, some very well, and so the isolationist attitude with which he’d first approached campus no longer manifested. Or maybe, most simply, he couldn’t withhold a boyish smile that day.

  Twenty, maybe twenty-five of his friends and family had come up for the day. Aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends—they’d all packed themselves into a procession of four-seat cars and caravanned up to New Haven. In their center were Frances and Jackie. Jackie sat beside her mother’s wheelchair, both of her hands stacked upon ­Frances’s on the armrest. The dean read each of our names from a small lectern to the right of the stage, while the master gave out diplomas in the center. When she said, “Rober
t DeShaun Peace. Bachelor of science in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, with distinction in the major,” a cacophony of whoop-WHOOPS broke out from his cheering section in the rear of the tent. Rob took his time mounting the stage. With his left hand on Rob’s shoulder, the master handed the diploma over with his right, and the two men lightly hugged one another, and the hooting behind us reached a crescendo to the point where the more reserved parents and students (meaning about 90 percent of those present) began turning their heads: faces calibrated to amusedly share in the joyfulness even while, in their minds, some had to be wondering why such people couldn’t contain themselves a little bit more respectably. Then Rob was at the microphone on which the master had made his opening statements. He cleared his throat, a signal for his section to calm down. The heat-trapping tent grew quiet.

  He glanced at a scrap of paper in his hand, pocketed it, and said, “A Yale education encompasses more than classes; it is the experience that has better prepared me for life. I would like to thank all the people who supported me in this endeavor, and I dedicate this moment to my motivation and heart, my mother.”

  I expected the audience, led by the New Jersey contingent, to break into cinematic applause. But for a few moments, everyone remained silent and still. The clapping and cheers, when they came, were brief. Ty shouted, “Peace OUT!” and we all laughed. Then Rob returned to his seat between us.

  I don’t recall much of the day after that, no doubt because it revolved around more drinking, more parties. People I’d barely known or openly disliked would stumble up to me and drape a bear hug over my shoulders, slurring exclamations like, “We did it!” and “We survived!” At one point I went back to our room, half cleared out at this point, just to take a breather. Rob was there, also alone, rolling a joint on our coffee table with that precious way he had. He offered me a hit. I shrugged, sure. We sat and got stoned, maybe for fifteen minutes or so. We must have talked, but about what I will never remember. Most likely, we just bullshitted without much allusion to the fact that this was it. College was over. On to the next thing, whatever that was. These moments, our last as roommates, were very calm.

  I woke early the next day and, hungover, packed the last of my things. I knocked lightly on Rob’s door to say goodbye; he wasn’t there. Dio, his python, was coiled up in the glass tank atop the black trunk, still digesting a vermin eaten five or six days earlier. Textbooks were piled up in the corner to be sold back to the Yale Bookstore. Two duffel bags in the center of the floor were half packed with clothes. The pictures of the Burger Boyz at 34 Smith Street and Jackie at St. Benedict’s graduation had been pulled down. The incense he’d burned couldn’t fully mask the smell of stale marijuana; over the years, I’d grown fond of that smell, the vestiges of good times that had clung to curtains and carpeting: the smell of my friend.

  I didn’t wait to say goodbye to Rob. I figured that the nature of our friendship—the nature of Rob himself—didn’t necessitate that final ceremony after all the ceremonies we’d already endured: the man hug, the firm-grip-thumb-lock-hand-clench-half-hug, the not-quite-tearful “Later on, man.” Rob was cooler and easier than that, and he wasn’t going anywhere. There would always be time, I thought.

  During Yale graduation weekend in 2002, Rob wore the African scarf that he’d been given during the “Black Graduation” ceremony one week earlier.

  Part IV

  Mr. Peace

  Ty Cantey (second from left), Rob (third from left), and I (third from right) had a roommate reunion when they served as groomsmen at my wedding in Brooklyn, 2005. Later in the night, we three “Threw Dem Bows” on the dance floor.

  Chapter 9

  HE WAS AMAZED by what had been left behind. Expensive winter coats, racks filled with CDs, textbooks, halogen lamps, six-­hundred-thread-count sheet sets that had never been unpackaged, gold and silver jewelry, stereos, Discmans, and even laptop computers: graduated seniors had simply departed without these things. And Rob—who was working the summer custodial job for the fourth straight year, cleaning up the campus between graduation in mid-May and the alumni reunions in early June—stayed to sweep it all up. He dealt with items of value first, stashing anything sellable in an industrial garbage bag that he set aside. Then came the work of hauling abandoned furniture down the stairs, sweeping up all the dust and grime and hair that had accumulated over the year, mopping and painting, reconstructing bunk beds that had been pulled apart in room after room. The various spaces he’d inhabited over the years were now empty, given a clean coat of white paint, awaiting next year. We’d all come to Yale aiming to leave a footprint; Rob knew from this work that none of us had, at least not in the dorm rooms.

  He took a lot of cigarette breaks alongside the full-time maintenance employees, men he’d befriended over the years. They were generally derisive of the students, the way they felt entitled to just leave their shit for others to pick up. Dozens of fifty-gallon trash bags’ worth of said shit lay in a mountain in a corner of the quad, next to the master’s house. The final task was to transport them to a Dumpster on Park Street before the last debris of our time here was hauled away.

  They did sell the valuables they’d collected. Like every year, the six-person custodial team combined what they’d found into one cache of contraband. First, they sold the textbooks back to the bookstore, which paid a fraction of the cover price no matter the condition—but still, it was cash. As for the rest, each member helped unload what he could. Some used the Internet. Others pounded the pavement in their neighborhoods. Afterward, trusting one another’s honesty, they divided the profits evenly. At the end of the three-week stint, Rob came away with almost $1,000. The figure paled in comparison to the money he had already saved. But still, he made enough to cover the summer’s rent in New Haven. He also gave himself a graduation present in the form of a second tattoo, this one on his left biceps, of an African woman with a tall headdress seen in profile. The image matched exactly Jackie’s lone body art, inked during her twenties, before Rob was a thought.

  He remained on the custodial staff during the reunions in early June. A few thousand alumni from as recently as five years ago and as far back as the 1950s caught up beneath tented open bars and catered food spreads. The schedule included lectures and three-course meals and various activities like group hikes up East Rock and tours of the botanical greenhouse—but the guests (the older they were, the increasingly white and stodgy and male) mostly hung out and drank, like they’d done in college. Rob moved around the fringes of the various gatherings, emptying the trash cans and picking up the plastic cups, napkins, and spilled food. Like the very first week of school, nobody looked at him and assumed he was anything other than a janitor. Unlike the first week of school, he was one.

  After the reunion cleanup was complete, he went back to work in the med school lab, where he assisted in researching the pharmacology of proteins that led to infectious disease, inflammation, and cancer. His primary focus was on the structural biology of chemokines—protein receptors secreted by cells to recruit an immune response to the site of an infection. Using X-ray crystallography, Rob spent the summer and fall isolating the CXCL12 (SDF-1alpha) and vMIP-II/vCCL2 chemokines for the GPCR CXCR4 coreceptor for HIV-1. This particular receptor also mediated metastasis in a number of cancers, as well as a mutation responsible for an immunosuppressive disease known as WHIM syndrome. The applications included stem cell transplantation and the production of medicines to halt the takeover of these afflictions. In our dorm room, we had always joked admiringly about the fact that Ty Cantey—who was now preparing for a yearlong fellowship at Cambridge, England, before undergoing a seven-year MD-PhD program at Harvard Med School—was destined to cure cancer someday. I had no idea that Rob, in the lab he’d walked to almost every day during junior and senior years, was actually helping to do it.

  He lived with Raquel, in a basement apartment near Jacinta’s that they called “the dungeon.” The apartment was r
elatively small, especially for a man and a woman who were not romantically involved. The only windows were at the top of the wall, giving them a view of the calves and ankles of passersby. A gigantic hammock was strung across the high ceiling in a makeshift loft, for storage and, on occasion, amorous escapades. They kept their clothes in plastic containers and cardboard boxes. In lieu of paint that they didn’t want to pay for, Raquel decorated with bohemian shawls and tapestries from her travels. Their home was not unlike a college dorm room, and their day-to-day lives were not unlike college in that they felt transient, based on their work and social lives outside the domicile. And yet, within it, they found themselves playing the roles of husband and wife. Rob came home from work and Raquel would have dinner on the table, huge spreads of Puerto Rican fare, stewed pork or chicken sweetened with plantains and agave nectar, ladled over a bed of yellow rice. Over the meal, they would talk about their days, often wearily, completing one another’s sentences. Mostly, Raquel did the talking—the custodial job being too banal for Rob to bother getting into, the lab work too complicated. She was stressed about having skipped a year, the financial and social task that lay ahead, the fact that she would be finishing school alone since most of her friends had left and were already beginning their lives. Rob would calmly tell her to put her head down and do what she needed to do to get through it. He would tell her that he was her friend; she could rely on him.