by Jeff Hobbs
Why wouldn’t Rob just listen? Even as Oswaldo intentionally began to disengage, the question nagged him, and in certain moments, studying alone in the library toward his degree, haunted him. Rob should have been studying alone in the library, too—not hanging out with all those friends in the hood.
Which was the answer to his question. Rob wouldn’t listen because of his friends, from Oakdale and Mt. Carmel, from football games, from the stoops of East Orange, from St. Benedict’s, from his various dealing networks. These people were all grown now. Some, like Shannon Heggins, a junior high school girlfriend of Rob’s, had children with fathers who’d already split. Some, like Curtis, had decent jobs and were doing just fine. Some, like Flowy, were living more precariously. Some, like Tavarus—who’d just been arrested for possession with intent to distribute, the mark on his record akin to having a 0.7 GPA in high school but much harder to fix—had already fallen below the line. And Rob strived to be the Man among these peers. If someone needed money for rent or for kids’ clothes, Rob thumbed it over. If someone’s car broke down and he needed a ride, Rob picked him up. If someone was bored and wanted company, Rob rolled through. These efforts went both ways. Once, when Rob’s tire blew out at one in the morning on the Merritt Parkway en route to visit Daniella Pierce—still working in New Haven on urban education policy reform as it pertained to ex-felons—he called Flowy, who immediately hopped in his own car to bring him a spare and work the jack (Rob, for all his knowledge, was helpless when it came to cars), an hour’s drive each way, with tolls. When he had trouble pulling rent from his tenants on Greenwood Avenue, Drew came by to intimidate a payment out of them. Victor and Big Steve had taken Dio off Jackie’s hands when he’d first gone to Rio, and they’d ended up keeping him for three years as the pet had grown from a short stack of coils into a thick, formidable reptile capable of popping the metal lid off his own tank. (Victor ultimately gave Dio to a local pet store owner, who most likely found him too big to sell; I sometimes wonder if the snake was released, and is now still making slow S-curves through the Pine Barrens, prowling for mice and squirrels.)
Friendship, in this community, was simple: it meant being there. Friendship necessitated no pride, no projection of having your shit together if you didn’t, no passivity, no judgment—and especially no fronting, which had characterized so many relationships at Yale. Friendship here was the most dependable means by which they were going to get through their various lives. Because of the value Rob placed on relationships, he could reply, “Chill, I’m on it,” whenever Oswaldo hammered on the fact that Rob was better than where he’d grown up, and that a very big life lay in store for him if he would only take the first steps toward it. Because no longer would that life step toward him the way Charles Cawley had in the St. Benedict’s gymnasium.
Oswaldo also understood that Rob fronted more than anyone else Oswaldo had ever known. As in high school, when Rob had veiled his personal hardships with intelligence and leadership, he now veiled them with a generosity that was incredibly costly, in both dollars and emotional drain.
The emotional drain intensified when, on a prison visit in the fall of 2005—not long after my wedding—his father told him that he had cancer in his brain.
RAQUEL HAD GRADUATED from Yale a year behind us, in ’03. Simon, her future husband, was still at a prestigious med school in Manhattan studying cardiology, and she moved to the city that summer, just after Lyric Benson’s murder. She lived with Simon on the second floor of a building his parents had just bought on 119th Street and First Avenue, in Spanish Harlem. Their home was a run-down unit above a street that not five years prior had been a drug-dealing hot zone (renovations began immediately, and the house was practically gutted around them). She worked for a nonprofit documentary film company and freelanced in the TV industry. Because much of her work involved shooting B-roll film in nightclubs for shows like HBO’s Taxicab Confessions as well as attending wrap and premiere parties—and also because she’d been using drugs like Ecstasy since she was fourteen—amping up her nightlife seemed like part and parcel of her chosen career. These self-destructive habits were accelerated by a number of factors she couldn’t control: Simon’s long hours, being responsible by remote for the less self-sufficient members of her extended family in Miami, meeting her father for the first time in a dingy motel room in Little Havana and encountering a stranger who didn’t much care for her, and the fact that drug use was common among so many of her friends, from both childhood and Yale. She carried on, sometimes heading straight from a nightclub to work in the morning. Simon was very straight, very driven, and very loyal. Between twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, he trained seriously in Shaolin kung fu, kendo, and qigong while Raquel’s life, increasingly, revolved around partying.
Throughout these years, Rob stopped by often, bringing weed and a fleeting hour of good company with him. He had a knack for appearing when she most needed his face and voice to recenter herself. He’d come by late, usually after midnight, when he had deliveries to make in Harlem. Quietly, Rob had been branching out his network geographically, for reasons having to do with safety more than money; he didn’t want to become too conspicuous in the small world of East Orange, where the Double II Set Bloods ruled much of the commerce and didn’t look kindly on competition. Raquel was an outstanding cook, and as when they’d lived together in New Haven, she always had food waiting, along with a bottle of Hennessy in the cupboard reserved for him. Rob would eat a lot, and then drink—also a lot. If Simon was at the hospital, they would share a joint or a bowl or a blunt. Rob would invariably come in with a scowl, complaining with exhaustive sighs about the bureaucracy at school, about his tenants, about tolls and traffic on the George Washington Bridge. But the food, alcohol, and THC would calm him until he reached a place of easy laughter pouring through that grin, that old grin that she and everyone else remembered from college. When he reached that place, he would talk of travel.
Rob’s cousin Nathan worked for Continental Airlines. Included among airline employee perks was a certain allotment of “buddy passes,” certificates allowing select friends and family to travel on standby, at cost, anywhere in the world. Nathan gave one to Rob, and he used it to visit Rio twice more during summer breaks. But he’d begun looking for destinations far beyond Brazil. A college classmate was teaching English as a second language in South Korea. He wanted to go there. Hrvoje Dundovic had been talking wistfully of returning to Pula, Croatia, during their water polo games. He wanted to go there. He had aunts, uncles, and cousins in Ohio, Florida, and Georgia. He wanted to visit all of them. He’d constructed a second community in Rio de Janeiro. He wanted to live there part-time, and maybe teach at the Federal University, once he got his degree. At least, he said he did.
“What is stopping you from doing any or all of those things?” she asked, having herself found a way to travel during college.
He gave a gentle glare from beneath his hard brow and rubbed his thumb back and forth across his fingers.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she said, laughing. “Woe is Rob Peace! Woe is Rob Peace! You went to Yale. If you can’t figure out how to do what you want to do, that’s your own damn fault.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Yeah, I know.”
When he left, he spent the early-morning hours driving around Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, where most of his non-Newark clients lived. He’d pick up $10 here, $30 there, maybe returning to his apartment on Greenwood around five or six with $100 to $200 profit after overhead and eighty miles logged on the odometer. Then he’d power-nap until seven and get ready to go to school. After a day of teaching and coaching, he usually stopped by Chapman Street for dinner with Frances and Jackie, if she wasn’t working the night shift. Back on Greenwood Avenue late at night, when he wasn’t dealing, Rob continued working on his father’s behalf.
He wasn’t trying to engineer another appeal at this point; he was simply trying to gain his father access to med
ical treatment outside the prison medical ward. All he could do was write letters that emphasized his father’s good behavior, listed the jobs and meeting groups with which Skeet was involved, and—increasingly as Skeet’s illness progressed through the winter of 2006—pleaded as a son on behalf of his dying father.
. . . I am twenty-five years old. I graduated from Yale University in 2002 with a degree in molecular biochemistry and biophysics. I now teach biology at the St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, NJ. I plan to go to graduate school next year to continue my education and become a college professor. Though I was just seven years old when my father was incarcerated, none of my achievements would have been possible without him. This is not because he did homework with me when I was little. Even after he went to jail he called me. He told me to study hard and take advantage. It wasn’t just his words that helped me. It was the way he carried himself in prison. He kept his dignity. He did not cause trouble. He did not show any weakness during the many times I visited him. He inspired me to be who I am and who I’m going to be. Clearly, my father’s disease cannot be properly treated in the penitentiary medical ward. I studied the chemistry of cancer at Yale Medical School during my time as an undergraduate. I know exactly how it works and what it does. My father needs clinical treatment right now. In light of his record, I do not understand why this cannot be made available to him . . .
But Rob was fighting a battle that would not be won. Statewide, the correctional facilities went on complete lockdown beginning in the early spring of 2006, due to an intercepted letter sent by a Bloods leader named Lester Alford. In the letter, Alford had stated that over a dozen weapons had been stashed in four prisons, including New Jersey State (formerly Trenton State), and a coordinated uprising was planned that would culminate in the assassination of Mayor-Elect Cory Booker. While the authorities checked into the validity of the letter—most believed it to be dubious, since the language was not coded the way most gang correspondence was—all inmate-release programs (furloughs, conjugal visits, work-release, and medical) were suspended indefinitely. All Rob could do was visit the prison as often as possible and look through the Plexiglas at his father, a man who had always been broad and thick—like his son—and had become more so through sixteen years of weight lifting in the prison yard, and now began to waste away as if some invisible spirit were penetrating the prison walls each night to peel away layers from both his mind and his body.
FRIAR LEAHY SENSED the turbulence. Rob was perhaps more adept now than he’d been even in high school at concealing whatever struggles he was going through. He went through his days as he always had: giving lectures on simple cell structure, bringing the hammer down on sassy students, teaching the geometry of shot angles in the pool. Friar Leahy knew about Rob’s father, as Rob had formally asked permission to leave school early once or twice a week to get down to Trenton before visiting hours ended. But whatever weighed on him now was heavier even than Skeet’s declining health. Whether his father’s illness precipitated a larger existential question of what he was supposed to be doing or whether the two existed on wholly separate planes of consciousness, Friar Leahy didn’t know. What he did know—what Coach Ridley had known during their first conversation about becoming a teacher—was that Rob was not destined to work at a high school. He also knew that Rob Peace was strong enough, resilient enough, and smart enough to figure out what he was destined to do. At least he hoped that to be the case, because he knew that Rob would neither ask for counsel nor receive it if given.
The water polo team was not strong, but they still traveled to tournaments every weekend. He and Coach Ridley would take turns driving the vans. When Rob wasn’t driving, he sat in the back, with players such as Truman Fox. Truman was a quiet kid, white with blond hair, relatively affluent. He was also lazy, one of those who tiptoed along the bottom during laps and found creative ways to dip out of the weight room. Rob—“Coach Peace” to Truman—singled him out, though not as harshly as some of the others. He treated the boy almost like a science project.
“Why are you here?” Rob asked.
“Because we have to play a sport; it’s required,” Truman replied.
“Okay, so play it, don’t just fuck around.”
“I’m not fucking around.”
“You’re not making it hard.”
Truman didn’t know what that meant.
“If you go into something, you better make it hard. Otherwise what’s the point?”
Truman still found his words elusive, yet intimidating. Rob was wearing one of his dark glowers, signaling exasperation.
“Look, anything you do, if it isn’t hard, it isn’t doing anything for you. So you’re better off not doing it. Use your time somewhere else.”
That Saturday, when Rob opened up the weight room for a voluntary session, Truman was there. After that, their van ride conversations strayed away from the sport of water polo and the reasons for playing it. Rob would look out the window at the dense foliage sweeping past on the interstates of New England and Pennsylvania, and he’d ask Truman about his family, his upbringing, what he wanted to be when he grew up. He talked about what he believed defined a Real Man: someone who had honor, curiosity, respect for women, and took responsibility for his people. The talk was real, and Truman remained surprised that Rob was willing to engage with him this way, being as they’d come from such different backgrounds. Not apparent in these moments was the hard, glaring façade Rob often brought to the classroom and the pool; he looked soft, even gentle. The fact that Coach Peace went out of his way to be friends with him was powerful, and Truman held on to that power tightly both at school and at home. He felt that if Rob saw a spark in him, even if Truman himself did not, then it was his own responsibility to stoke it (Truman would ultimately play water polo in college). He didn’t know that on a normal day after practice, while he and his teammates were changing back into dry clothes, his coach was mentally preparing to spend the night selling drugs.
PROCURING ENOUGH MARIJUANA to distribute was not difficult, but procuring quality marijuana was. At Yale, the quality had barely mattered; college kids would smoke anything, and most of them didn’t know the difference. In the city, although many drug users would smoke anything, they had more options and less disposable wealth. To remain the go-to guy in his small network of buyers, Rob had to be available when the calls came, and he had to provide a product that was reliable in the high it engendered. There were two primary types of high. “Body stone”—also known as “couch lock,” the typical effect of smoking the indica strain of the cannabis plant—was characterized by a very intense lethargy, a difficulty with and indifference to practical tasks, and a desire for meditative solitude. “Head high”—from the sativa strain—was more energetic, typified by stoned people talking and laughing with enhanced visual and auditory senses, prone to psychedelic experiences and, sometimes, bouts of paranoia. Rob wasn’t particularly fond of either; when stoned, he preferred to be somewhere in between: able to accomplish tasks and operate in the world, but to do so in an unbothered state, free from the gravity pulling him in all directions. As he struggled with his mother’s needs and his father’s illness and his own stasis, he sought to engineer the high that suited him.
In the basement of 34 Smith Street, where Curtis lived alone now, Rob invented his own personal strain of marijuana, an indica-sativa hybrid known widely as Sour Diesel. The Burger Boyz had once packed themselves into this space to do their homework over sodas and Mrs. Gamble’s cooking. Now Rob spent nights there alone constructing a hydroponic system of planters beneath LED lights, which consumed more than three-fourths of the floor space. His parent plants were sent from the Emerald Triangle in California, heavily wrapped in dozens of layers of cellophane to contain the scent, then packaged in kitchen appliance boxes—toasters, blenders, microwaves, appearing as an eBay purchase. Patiently, through the same process of trial and error that had defined his years in th
e lab, he used simple biology to fuse various genotypes in the seedling stage, and over the course of months in early 2006, he perfected his strain. The basement wasn’t big enough for mass production, but it spawned sufficient product to cut his Sour Diesel with the less particular buds he bought from his connects. To intensify the high—and raise profits—he used the low boiling point of butane to distill hash oil from the typically discarded stalks and leaves, which he then dripped into the smokable buds. This work was repetitive, laborious, and dangerous (not just because of the police patrolling the neighborhood, but also because butane fumes are poisonous, and he had to wear a gas mask while he worked). But, during the winter of 2006, this was how Rob spent the bulk of his free time: alone in the basement making designer marijuana.
“Why?” Again and again, his friends asked him this question, with humor more often than not. At the time, Rob’s day-to-day seemed like a sitcom to them: Yale grad high school teacher running a marijuana lab out of his best friend’s basement in Illtown.
Rob would just shrug and give one of his that’s-my-own-damn-business looks, and his friends would answer their own question: he needed the money, and this was something he knew how to do.