The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  Later, Rebecca and Rob sat together, apart from Ty and me as we watched the races and marveled at split times.

  “You picked a good one,” he told her, gesturing toward me.

  “I know,” she said.

  “No,” he said, looking directly into her eyes, face beyond serious, nearly grave. “For real. He’s my boy. He’s one of the good ones.”

  Near the end of the afternoon, Rob and I made a food run to the vending area, and he said the same to me: “That’s a good woman; you’re a lucky man.” I asked if he recalled my college heartbreak sophomore year, and the night he’d spent trying to “get me right.” He grinned and shook his head, surely recalling my pathetic state. “Yeah, well, look at you now, brother. Things always come around.”

  Rebecca, more than me or Ty, understood Rob’s language. She’d grown up as one of the few white girls on her block in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, known during her youth in the late ’70s as “Bang-bang-shoot-’em-up-Fort-Greene.” Her parents were both social workers and community activists who had never made more than $50,000 between them. They spent some evenings trying to shoo the johns from local bars. The thick wrought-iron cages set over the doors and windows of their home didn’t always prevent burglaries, as intruders found a passage in through the roof. Rebecca had been mugged at gunpoint with her mother while walking the block between the C train and their front door. Her father, who was legally blind, wore a bridge in his mouth, because half of his teeth had been knocked out by a mugger in Fort Greene Park in the middle of the day (though, due to the tide of gentrification that would never be possible in East Orange, her parents’ home, purchased for $5,000 down in 1970, was now worth upward of $2 million). From Rob, she sensed the weight of similar experiences, and she knew that those experiences lent a grace to even the simplest of sentiments. When he told her that I was his boy, he meant it. In a way that was less fleeting than the day itself, his words solidified the decision she had made. If a guy like Rob Peace saw value in the man she was going to marry, then she knew it must be there. Because Rob wouldn’t humor her about something as real as friendship.

  WE WERE AMERICANS in our midtwenties, finding apartments and homes, meeting our future spouses, picking (or sometimes falling into) our future careers. We were creating our social circles and the hobbies around which those circles would revolve. We were becoming adults, or at least people who could present as such. This coming of age, in our particular generation, was warped, because of the accelerated pace at which the world seemed to be changing. We hadn’t had cell phones or email in high school; our lives depended on them now. We began to manage relationships exclusively through text messages. In no moment of the day were we unavailable to anyone interested in our time. We shopped differently, read the news differently (or not at all), made plans differently. A cultish aspect had overtaken pop culture, with Apple products, the synthetic takeover of music, Sex and the City theme parties. Meanwhile, the country was in two wars that we—and by “we” I mean the people I knew in Manhattan, most of whom hadn’t been present on 9/11—felt only abstractly connected to. With the world and its goings-on constantly blasting through our computer screens, relevance was the thing we craved, whether it was obtained in the media spotlight or with the accumulation of wealth or in being counter-everything or finding an apartment in a cool neighborhood. For a socially phobic and culturally antiquated guy like me, I was content to watch from the outer edges.

  Observing people I’d gone to college with, tracking the personality changes that had occurred between the blotto days preceding graduation and now, was both nourishing and unsettling. A girl who had been renowned on campus for her hard drinking and, shall we say, liberal attitude toward sexual relationships, was now a straitlaced lawyer for a prestigious firm, engaged to a successful banker a decade older than she. A charismatic and admired football star was now working 120-hour weeks at Lehman Brothers, with a growing paunch and personality dulled by all the numbing data he spent those hours analyzing. The senior class president, who had seemed built for a powerhouse political career, had become an Episcopal minister in a small rural town. As so many of us had done in college, we were still reinventing ourselves.

  Everyone paused in the weeks after Lyric Benson died. She had been a classmate in Pierson College, beautiful, with an unbridled energy. She was the girl who, on one of the first nights of school, performed a belly dance over a very stoned Rob. An actress in college, she’d begun building a film career quickly afterward, with an Amex commercial and a guest appearance on Law & Order. In small, meaningful steps, she was heading toward her dream. However, as she did so, she dragged an anchor from college. During senior year, she’d begun dating an older man who lived in New Haven. He was in his midthirties, handsome in a worn-out way. He sported a long ponytail and fitted suits and became a staple at college parties. A rumor circulated that he worked for the CIA, or had been an Army Ranger, or both. To her female friends, he was mature and alluringly mysterious. To her male friends, he seemed like a pathetic predator of younger women and a liar (also, we were jealous). Either way, people were sure that the romance would run its course quickly, and Lyric would grow wiser. We were all growing wiser.

  In the spring of 2003, he shot her in the face, fatally, at point-blank range. The murder occurred in the vestibule of her Chinatown walk-up building, in front of her mother, as recompense for ending their engagement after he’d begun exhibiting obsessive behavior. Then he’d killed himself. Her picture had been on the cover of the New York Post among other publications. The pure grisliness of the murder-suicide enthralled the whole city for half a day. Among those who knew her well, the tragedy was paired with a terrible set of emotions—loss, regret, and the guilt of knowing that if they’d been experienced enough to have foreseen such an ending back in college (though, granted, no one could have foreseen this ending), they could have guided her away from him sooner, and she would still be alive. The proximity to this kind of violence, this permanently engraved cause and effect, had been previously unknown to almost all of us—Rob Peace being one of the few who had knowledge of murder, premature death, the feeling that coursed through that particular brand of funeral. Lyric’s death reminded us that having a Yale degree on our résumés could open many doors, but it couldn’t protect us from life, which didn’t much care about résumés.

  Amid all the change and drama surrounding the Class of ’02, Rob’s life in 2005, in the midpoint of his twenties, was defined by how little things changed. His friends and family were trying to get through one day and then the next, as they always had. The hustlers along Center Street still leaned against the same walls and tried to start the same shit with young children in their school uniforms. Old friends of his father still told the same Skeet stories while leaning out from their front stoops. Sharpe James was still the mayor, though increasingly embattled, with a face weathered by his time in office and a challenge by the young, charismatic, and Yale-educated Cory Booker. Jackie still worked the same schedule at the same nursing home for the same pay. And Rob was still walking into the same building each morning that he’d walked into during high school, passing beneath the sign that read WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME.

  The primary change Rob had been dealing with since he began teaching had to do with his grandfather Horace. Though he wasn’t technically diagnosed, he clearly suffered from dementia, or some comparable waning of the mind. He watched TV most of the time, but if left alone he got antsy. The previous summer, in 2004, he’d left the house, gotten in the car, and driven off as if going out to buy bourbon. Eight fraught hours later, he’d calmly called Jackie from South Carolina, where he’d driven to “visit family,” even though the Peace family didn’t have people in South Carolina. Rob had flown down to drive him back. Afterward, Rob did even more than he already was to take the burden of the elder generation off his mother, an effort born of the guilt he felt for the hours she’d worked, the education those hours had given t
o him. As a boy, he’d compensated by taking care of household chores. As a young man, he’d contributed money from his “campus jobs.” Now, in addition to the same chores and fiscal contributions, he did his best to care for Frances and Horace, whether that meant sitting with them in the living room watching reruns of the sitcom 227, or shuttling Frances to endless doctor’s appointments to treat her emphysema, or telling stories about Rio (censored versions, no doubt). Horace passed away, peacefully, in 2005.

  At this time, Rob had a college degree. He owned a car and a house. He traveled as much as he could during breaks from school. He helped his family and friends as capably as his means allowed. In most contexts, he was living a successful life already, and because of who he was, he still had potential for so much more success.

  But his time at Yale, in the eyes of those close to him, had altered the meaning of the word “success.” And he needed to make changes, belated though they might be, if he was going to get closer to whatever that word had come to signify in his mind.

  Later that summer after the Penn Relays and after Horace had passed, Skeet collapsed in the prison yard. His blood was drawn in the prison medical ward and sent to a state lab for testing. And when the results came back, Skeet found out exactly what had been making him so tired.

  Chapter 11

  STEAMING MOUNDS OF beef and pork, lathered in oil and sugar, rose above the brims of the platters between us. A large pitcher of sangria was already halfway emptied. On the Friday afternoon before my wedding, I’d taken a break from the manual labor of preparation for the reception, at Rebecca’s parents’ brownstone, to take the Path train to Newark for lunch with Rob. I’d enlisted him as a groomsman. He hadn’t been able to make it to the bachelor party a few weeks earlier, and I was glad about that: the event had been suitably lame. But that Friday, Rob left St. Benedict’s during lunch to pick me up at Penn Station and take me to an all-you-can-eat special at Fernandes, in the Ironbound, his favorite rodízio restaurant. He went there often and had an established routine: eat, take a cigarette break, drink, cigarette break, eat and drink, cigarette break, eat, cigarette break, drink. He said that not eating and drinking simultaneously allowed the stomach to expand more comfortably and accommodate more food. I had never seen a performance like it. The meal lasted for over two hours.

  My family situation had improved: everyone was coming to the wedding, and my parents were throwing the rehearsal dinner that night. But an edginess still surrounded the event, if only because very few people in my orbit seemed to have any faith in this marriage lasting.

  I mentioned these tribulations as briefly as possible to Rob during one of the “drink” phases of the meal. In college and after, he’d always seemed to live in a world above the one in which my own various troubles existed. Though always willing and capable of giving advice, he did so with a remoteness that colored whatever he said as wise. Today was no different. He said, “People bring their own shit to the way they see things. If they don’t believe what you’re doing is right, that’s their choice. But the choice has more to do with them than with you. Don’t worry about it. You made your own choice.”

  I’d trekked here this afternoon hoping to be centered by him and his Robness, and he didn’t disappoint. Mostly, he told me about Rio and his plans to go back. The wistfulness in his voice was absolute, trumping anything he said about being a teacher, coach, or homeowner.

  “I guess, with all the vacation time, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to get there,” I said.

  He laughed. “That’s the thing about it—you get all this time, but there’s no dough. Vacation? I spend those weeks working.”

  “Working what?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “You know. This and that. Whatever I can pick up.”

  I had sold my first novel just a few weeks before, for enough of an advance to provide security for roughly a year. People usually reacted to this news in one of three ways: with exaggerated elation, expounding on the achievement (from friends); with a ho-hum, “Oh, that’s good news” (from my family, followed by a pessimistic, “So do you have to give that money back if the book doesn’t sell well?”); or with low-key compliments veiling competitive contempt (from other writers: “I guess the whole ‘young guy in New York’ thing is back in vogue . . .”). Rob’s reaction was one I’d never heard before. “Let me know when that comes out; I’ll pick up a copy,” he said without surprise or manufactured congratulations, but simply as an extension of the steady confidence he had in the fact that I, or anyone, could accomplish our dreams if we stayed the course long enough. Not sure how Rob would feel about his ex-roommate writing a book about a gay man who sociopathically seduces both halves of a married couple, all of them Manhattan-based Yale alumni, I just shrugged and said, “Will do.”

  The following night, an accident on the BQE caused a traffic snarl that plugged every western passageway into Brooklyn; Rob was stuck in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel during the ceremony but made it to the reception. He brought a date whom he hadn’t mentioned the day before, Katrina. She was very beautiful, with short dreadlocks and a sparkly smile. Along with Ty, another track teammate named Phil, and the family who lived next door to my in-laws, they were the only black people there. Hurricane Katrina had just struck New Orleans weeks earlier, and she spent much of the night humoring guests who bombarded her with comments like, “That’s an unlucky name these days!” Between pictures, trying to make sure my family were enjoying themselves, toasts, and conversations with eccentric uncles from both sides of the aisle, the night passed quickly. Whenever I did manage to escape, Rob and Katrina were always close by. He remained, as ever, an easy retreat, one with whom there was no pressure to perform. He brought me a lot of drinks, knowing that the path to the bar was fraught for the groom. Ty requested a Ludacris song from the DJ, and we did the “Throw Dem Bows” dance they’d taught me in college, three or four of us alone in the center of the tiny dance floor in the parlor, for a few moments traveling back to simpler times. He and Katrina left quietly, with a pat on my shoulder and a nod. He slipped me an envelope containing a fifty-dollar bill, no note, as a wedding present.

  “Gonna go get some ass,” he said. “I’ll see you, Da Jeffrey.”

  “Soon, right?” I replied.

  “Trust,” he said.

  I watched them walk up South Portland Avenue, Katrina’s forearm slipped through the crook of his elbow, his shoulders hunched, his footsteps heavy beneath the midnight streetlights.

  Rebecca and I left for Los Angeles the next day, where we were moving (temporarily, I thought) because of her job working for a small film company.

  That was the last time I ever saw my friend.

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing, man?” This was Big Steve Raymond, Victor’s older brother. They were hanging out in Rob’s unit on the second floor of his house, barely furnished, still a work in progress. Rob was cutting a half pound of weed into dime bags, fielding calls on his cell phone, pounding coffee as he prepared to head out for a night of deliveries. His hiatus from dealing had lasted for about a year and a half, at which point financial pressures—no doubt arising from home ownership and renovations—had impelled him to resume his old profession, that too-easy equalizer. He’d done this quietly at first, and then less so.

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean, come on, man, what the fuck? You don’t need to be doing this . . .”

  Rob laughed gently. “It ain’t for shits and giggles.”

  Big Steve let the matter drop; he felt almost embarrassed offering his opinions to Rob. Though he was six years older, and he and Victor had survived more than their share of hardship, Rob was still the smart one, the Yale grad. Steve had dropped out of college freshman year, when his parents had passed away, and since then had been working primarily as a night security guard downstate in Browns Mills, New Jersey. He’d never done more than tread water, but not drowning felt like success. He and Victor l
ived together now; Victor was still working as a salesman for Home Depot, nervous because the FAA, due to the quick burnout of air traffic controllers, rarely hired anyone older than twenty-eight. Steve’s chest felt heavy watching Rob dealing drugs again, and dealing on a low level that left him a weary shell most days. Whenever he raised the matter, however, Rob would cut him short with these vague declarations about “doing what I gotta do.”

  At Yale, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he’d grown up in Newark. In Newark, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he’d gone to Yale.

  Oswaldo’s advice was the same that, a few years ago, he himself had refused to hear from others: “Get the fuck out of Newark. Get the fuck away from people who won’t get the fuck out of Newark.”

  He couched no vitriol in these declarations; Oswaldo just stated the reality of things as he knew them. Three years after graduation had found him working in a taco shop, getting high all the time to metabolize the fact that he was working in a taco shop, recklessly exposing himself to danger—such as the night he and Rob had been smoking in Orange Park, and one of their friends had mouthed off to a couple of Bloods trolling the park; guns had been drawn, and Oswaldo and Rob took shelter with “Auntie,” Victor and Big Steve’s aunt, in her nearby apartment. Oswaldo had suffered another nervous breakdown, but unlike in college, there hadn’t been a renowned psych ward into which he could comfortably check himself. So he’d driven to New Haven, just to get away, crashing with Anwar and other townie friends. He went to Yale’s Career Services and told a counselor there that if they didn’t help him figure out what to do, he’d most likely be dead in a year. With guidance, he was admitted to the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania the following fall, 2005. Now he was one year into a graduate degree in psychiatry, and he urged Rob whenever they spoke to follow in his footsteps—frustrated again and again by his friend’s ingrained belief that following in anyone’s footsteps would somehow betray who he was. Oswaldo thought that was nothing more than a cliché but resigned himself to the fact that getting too involved in such intractable, street-bred personality walls such as Rob’s was exactly the kind of thing that had caused his mind to spiral dangerously away twice in his life.