by Jeff Hobbs
Perhaps in all of his various and diverse social circles—the stoners, the scientists, the Burger Boyz—he was most comfortable in this role: sitting across from a female friend and passively permitting her to depend on him, to transfer her anxieties onto his shoulders the way his own mother rarely let him do. He was skilled at making a woman feel taken care of, and this knack had caused trouble before. Senior year, he’d been at the house Daniella Pierce shared with her boyfriend, Lamar. She was making dinner and had trouble opening a jar. She brought it to the living room, where Rob and Lamar were talking, and gave the jar to Rob. He opened it easily and assured her that she must have already loosened it up for him. They had a nice dinner—Daniella had become heavily involved in social work in the New Haven community, particularly in helping teenagers with police records finish high school, and Rob would listen to her catalog the alarming statistics for hours. After dinner, Rob left, which was when Lamar erupted at her with genuine outrage.
“What’d you give him the jar for?”
“Excuse me?” Daniella asked.
“The jar. You gave it to Rob to open it. I live here. I’m your man. I should have opened the jar.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she replied, but even then she began thinking about how instinctively she had given Rob the husband’s task. “You’re crazy.”
The intensity of the interaction—the visceral anger Rob was able to inspire in another man—amazed her. If Rob was aware of the effect he could have, he didn’t show it. He did spend much of his time with women who were involved with others. He did encourage them to open up to him in ways they never would to their actual boyfriends. Sometimes he would do this in the presence of those boyfriends. He didn’t seem to think twice about it, and he’d never made advances on a “married” woman. In exchange, these women braided his hair for him, watched kung fu movies with him, and cooked for him (Rob would never pass up a free meal). Generally, aside from a few episodes similar to the one with Lamar that could be brushed off as overreaction, he considered himself cool with the boyfriends. By all appearances, he remained ignorant of the fact that, over time, an increasing number of men, primarily black, began talking behind his back, calling him arrogant, calling him cheap, calling him a nigger.
“There are niggers, and there are brothers,” Rob had told me once, lightly. He was referring to a song that was so peppered with the word that it made me fidget. Simply hearing the n word set off all sorts of alarm bells in a white guy; though Rob was grinning and clearly enjoying this teachable moment, I knew I had to be careful about everything from my responses to my expressions to my hand gestures. Under no circumstances could I say the word myself, nor could I act as though I understood anything Rob said regarding the word.
I replied with a ponderous huh.
“Niggers just like to start shit,” he said. “They don’t value human interaction, let alone human life. They’re just stupid, period. They walk around, trying to act hard, trying to be bangers”—in Newark parlance, “bangers” was pronounced as two separate syllables: bang-gers. “That’s all a nigger cares about: acting hard. Fronting.”
“What about the brothers?” I asked. This word felt much safer.
“A brother’s like me. He just wants to take care of his own and chill.”
And during the summer and fall after graduation, that was pretty much what Rob Peace did. And even though he drove down to Newark every weekend, Jackie was not pleased.
The last four years had been the hardest of her life. She’d worked, she’d taken care of her ailing parents, she’d spent money as fast as she’d earned it on only the essentials. For the first time in her life, she’d been alone. The struggle that felt inseparable from the place and circumstances of her birth was primarily leavened by company—the big families, the stoop culture, the social gatherings outside liquor stores. But Jackie wasn’t like Skeet; she rarely ventured beyond the daily rhythms of home and work. The only leisure she allowed herself was the occasional trip to Atlantic City, where she played slots, sitting alone in a bank of strangers, pulling that crank again and again until the skin of her hand began to dry out and crack. If she couldn’t find a room for less than $30, she would drive there and then drive home. Otherwise, during her relatively few free hours, she sat on the porch and smoked. Frances would be inside watching TV, hooked to her oxygen tank, and Horace would be shuffling around. Jackie would sink deep into the Adirondack chair facing the vacant lot across the street, maybe exchanging a few words with a passing neighbor while projecting her preference for silent solitude. She would think mainly of Rob, at Yale. Landing her son at such a place had been her life’s primary goal, and yet the essence of that place had always escaped her. Yale, to her, was a corridor between stations, not a place with a pulse. She didn’t care much about the dynamics of living there, and when Rob visited during college, he spoke of those dynamics hardly at all. Lacking the information necessary to ponder what he was doing in New Haven, she thought instead of what he would be doing when he left.
From what she could tell, after graduation he wasn’t doing much. She figured that the lab work was good for him, but the only path it laid out would be toward more school, and if there was going to be more of that she didn’t understand why he seemed reluctant to get his education over with and settle down. Victor, to her, set the example: he’d gone to school in order to learn to fly, and now he was doing just that in the Air Force Reserve. The only goal her son seemed to talk about was Rio. He appeared to have some vague plan of establishing a scientific career there. Jackie didn’t know much about Rio, but she knew that the city was famous for parties, drugs, samba, poverty, robberies, and not science. Each time he left for New Haven, she would find a few hundred dollars in cash on the counter, the same spot he’d once left four or five dollars. She’d never asked for money. She didn’t depend on it, though it certainly helped. She chose not to wonder where it came from. Because he never left more than he seemed able to afford from his lab work, this was easy to do. And yet something about these bills—maybe the haughty way he fingered them out from a roll of cash, like a real operator—worried her.
She was also worried about him leaving the house when he was home. She hadn’t experienced this anxiety since he’d been a boy, and even then she hadn’t worried much, because he’d usually been with his father, or with friends to look out for him. During Rob’s college years, as Jackie watched from her perch on the porch, a sea change had overtaken the surrounding blocks in the form of gang violence. When Rob had left for college in 1998, there had been a few loose formations that could have been construed as gangs, mostly brought together by geographical proximity; young men had always been territorial about their neighborhoods and their drugs, and the resultant conflicts had caused most of the violence in Newark during the first two decades of Rob’s life. But those threats had also been relatively easy to navigate: you knew where the boundaries were, you knew where the dealing centers were, and you steered clear—or else you made sure you knew the right people; you Newark-proofed. But when Rob graduated from Yale in 2002, there were more than a hundred gangs operating in Essex County, and these gangs, these terrible loyalties, were based on people rather than places. People were more dangerous, less predictable, less clearly demarcated. The Sex Money Murder Bloods, the Nine Trey Bloods, the G-Shine/Gangster Killer Bloods, the Grape Street Crips, the 5-Deuce Hoover Crips, the Double II Set Bloods, the Rollin 60s Crips, the Fruit Town Brims, the Latin Kings, Ñeta, the Pagan’s Motorcycle Club, MS-13—they were defined by colors, obscure symbols graffitied on walls (some of these quite artful), and rituals that had no clear cause or limits. The most powerful entity in East Orange was the Double II Sets, a group that had been “incorporated,” so to speak, when a contingent of the Queen Street Bloods relocated to East Orange from Inglewood, California, in the mid-1990s (the “II” in the name referenced the “ll” of “Illtown,” a nickname for East Orange). With them, they’d brou
ght some of the practices and traditions of the West Coast Bloods, most notably a merciless treatment of disloyalty within their ranks.
The majority of gang-related homicides took place in public and were the result of retribution. But in Newark, far more than any other city in the nation, the gangs were intertwined with the drug trade in complicated ways. Twenty percent of gang violence in Newark was drug related, compared to 5 percent nationally. Gangs were known to cooperate with one another in order to string together and enforce distribution corridors, which ran like veins through the city. More than ever before, driving around these streets was a mortally dangerous endeavor, particularly if you were a black man in your early twenties with cornrows and tattoos, carrying cash and weed and desiring no affiliation with any group, and in fact carrying contempt, as Rob did, for those insecure enough to covet that affiliation. The standard warning to “watch your back” began to take on a meaning beyond the basic vigilance that a violent neighborhood necessitated; you literally had to watch your own back, because a stranger might be aiming a gun or a knife at it. At Yale, Rob’s initiations had entailed singing Madonna songs in the dining hall for water polo and arm wrestling campus police for Elihu. In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a tremendously cold, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to watch their backs.
THE BUSINESS OF dealing drugs was liquid, transient: connections appeared and then disappeared, usually due to prison sentences or attempts to avoid them. Rob’s initial connect—the one given him by Flowy—had fallen off the grid at some point; most likely he’d fled town to avoid conflict with a rival, police, or both. The subsequent source of his marijuana supply had come through Carl, in exchange for small kickbacks. Carl was in his late forties now, living in an apartment in Bloomfield. He insisted on being present for any transaction Rob made with his supplier, as if the man he considered his nephew might try to cheat him somehow. So Rob would drive to Carl’s apartment to pick him up, drive to the supplier’s house in Ivy Hill, smell the marijuana to make sure it wasn’t bunk, haggle over the price per pound—Rob had negotiated $1,800, which was on the very low end, and the supplier was constantly angling to raise the figure. Rob would go through the motions of standing his ground, speaking profanely but not threateningly while maintaining an exasperated but not derisive visage. He would act willing but not too willing to walk away. And, when the arduous transaction was complete, he would drive Carl back home, leaving him with $200.
Flowy, Tavarus, and Drew, all of whom were in Newark (like Tavarus, Drew had dropped out of college after two years), didn’t understand why he dealt with Carl. Plenty of more stable people would eagerly help him obtain those pounds of weed. Even a minor drug on a minor level involved fronting: haggling with suppliers, canvassing for buyers and haggling with them, too, the presence one had to maintain in the neighborhood in order to keep business fluid. Rob had to be cool and laid back while also tough, imposing. These contradictions were necessary in order to keep the gap between operating costs and profit wide enough to make the risk worth it, and they didn’t need to be compounded by rolling around with an unstable element such as Carl—who could be quick to take offense at real or imagined slights.
“He’s family,” Rob would mumble when asked.
“He’s wack,” Flowy replied.
“He’s my business.”
They figured that what Rob meant was that, of all the other men he could be associating with, none of them had lived in the house on Chapman Street while he was growing up, none of them had given him rides to the Essex County Jail to visit Skeet, none of them had driven the car that took his father home from prison that one and only time—an hour-long transit that Rob still carried with him. But still, his friends didn’t get it. Rob’s role as a dealer was already more complicated than the next guy’s, because he was now a Yale graduate tagged with all the many stigmata that simple word carried in this neighborhood’s underworld. Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League. To the extent that he could, Rob kept his Yale pedigree a secret from everyone he dealt with. If his supplier were to become aware of it, he would automatically assume Rob was trying to get one over on him, and even the suspicion was dangerous. So Rob played the role of desperate, struggling, paranoid, not-too-bright hustler once every couple weeks. And as he finally explained to his friends, he used Carl not out of loyalty or charity but as a beard to legitimize this image of himself, yet another Newark-proofing trick.
After these pickups, he would drive the stash back to New Haven, bury it in the black trunk beneath the python tank, and return to the high-definition screen in his lab to study the way proteins a few molecules wide interacted in a cancerous environment.
“WHAT’S IT LIKE, still being on campus after graduating?” I asked.
Rob shrugged. “Same old, I suppose. Quiet, at least.”
We were walking together along the western edge of campus, to a bar. It was early August 2002, and I was visiting for the weekend. The campus was placid during these off months, populated mostly by faculty and graduate students, the quads and throughways and bars nicely untrafficked. I was there to visit a female friend who was about to enter the Yale Drama School as a playwright. I’d emailed Rob and we’d arranged to grab a drink. To me, the atmosphere felt surreal in comparison to New York City, where hundreds of my classmates and I were now beginning to make our way, flinging ourselves fervently into the entropy of city life. Knowing how eager he’d been at times to get out of Yale, I was curious about the irony of him being the one who’d stayed behind.
Rob had been dealing with rapid atmospheric transitions, far greater than the one I was pondering, for the last eight years. He didn’t seem to worry about it in the slightest. And yet when he spoke of Rio, which was all he really spoke of that night, I heard a craving in his voice.
“When the sun goes down there,” he said, “everyone along the beach stops what they’re doing and claps. Every night.” He shook his head and smiled, seeing it. I’d never known Rob to be much of a romantic, but there it was in his eyes: pure romance, not with a person but with a place. A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as “bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.” As Rob’s still-vague plan to make it there for Carnival next spring coalesced, he seemed to feel like a part of that construction. At night before he went to bed, as he’d once done legal research on his father’s behalf, he now practiced Portuguese for an hour.
We had a few drinks and talked like this, ground-level information, as was our way. Then I met up with the playwright and her friends, aspiring artists all, who talked of nothing but Big Ideas and how they would capture their essences in prose and achieve greatness that way—or at least staff writing positions on cable TV shows. In comparison to the time I’d just spent with Rob, the rest of the night was painful in its pretension.
After graduation, like many of our classmates, I’d gone home for two weeks to do nothing except be genially back-patted for my Yale diploma. Unlike many, I had no job lined up and no plans for graduate school. I’d made attempts with various organizations and charter schools to become an English teacher in New York City, mostly in Harlem and Brooklyn, but the veteran administrators had taken one look and known immediately that the urban kids would steamroll me. I stayed at my uncle’s house in Summit, New Jersey, a base camp of sorts while I commuted into the city for job interviews, looking for something that would allow time to write books. Though I’d been to East Orange just weeks earlier for that cookout, I had no idea that the ritzy town in which I was crashing was less than a ten-minute drive from Rob’s neighborhood; the New Jersey Transit line took me through Newark Penn Station each morning, but the proximity still didn’t occur to me. Ultimately, I found a job writing a grant proposal for a broad “Life School�
� scheme conceived by a successful corporate event producer in the city. My brother made the connection for me, as family members were often able to do in the arena of Ivy League alumni.
Friends and teammates had already begun their finance jobs and were working upward of one hundred hours per week as data analysts. Others were beginning academic fellowships both here and abroad, or gearing up for law and medical schools. For those of us in New York, the city had a playground feeling of being unbound; an excitement fixed itself to negotiating dumpy sublets in the East Village, opening up social circles to include new and varied people, going to rock shows on Houston Street, and finding the best dive bars in which to talk giddily about how broke we all were and lament the $5 beers we were drinking. We strived to become “authentic” New Yorkers and, though we were embarking on different journeys, we clung to the idea of shared experience that buoyed us in that familiar off-to-college feeling even after college had passed us on.
Rob, in his way, did the same. For the first time, he owned a cell phone (throughout college, he’d used a beeper and exercised the device well), and he kept in close touch with everyone. Curtis was still at Morehouse on a five-year graduation plan. Tavarus was still working in real estate and had it in his head to try to flip houses, an idea that Rob took to himself, possessing as he did the start-up capital. Flowy was living with LaQuisha, still lifeguarding, landscaping, and helping friends fix their cars. Drew worked in construction. Victor had moved back in with his brother in southern New Jersey, and he’d gotten a job at Home Depot to make ends meet while hoping to eventually land a job with the FAA. Ty was in Cambridge, England, on his fellowship. Danny Nelson was getting an MBA at the University of Chicago. Daniella Pierce remained in New Haven, segueing her volunteer social work into a career. And Oswaldo Gutierrez had come home to Newark, where he was living with his family in a kind of emotional chaos that all but nullified the academic and mental progress he’d made at Yale. While his family expected him to begin contributing financially, his boyhood friends were trying to figure out what to make of him. Like Rob, he felt his psyche being racked by the relentless obligation to be of this world after the last four years had wholly removed him from it. In the meantime, he was twenty-two years old, unemployed, and in the grip of an internal maelstrom that he felt fundamentally unable to overcome. While looking for work, he helped his father’s home repair business, haggling with low-income Newarkers about how much a radiator should cost with the same tricky dynamics that Rob navigated while negotiating the price of weed.