The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  He went upstairs, where Curtis and Tavarus were peering out the front window.

  “Boobie’s back,” Curtis said with rare concern. Rob looked casually through the crack of the curtain. A sedan was parked directly in front of the house, engine idling. A glowing ember was visible through the windows, being passed among multiple silhouettes.

  “Yeah,” Rob said, “that’s his ride.”

  He’d been hearing noise from his connects that Boobie, a forceful member of the Double II Sets, had a beef with Rob—because by now word had slipped that his Sour Diesel was “off the hook” (meaning something so new and fresh that it could be taken straight off the hanger at a clothing store). Word had also gotten out that Rob had been dealing to some of Boobie’s people. He wasn’t poaching clients; he’d just become the guy they called if Boobie couldn’t be reached. Generally, this was not considered encroachment.

  “That stupid motherfucker,” Rob said, seeming more exasperated than afraid.

  “Should we call the police?” Curtis asked.

  “Are you crazy?” Rob replied as he gestured with his eyes to the basement below.

  “Let’s just head out the back,” Tavarus said. The house occupied a double lot, with a rear driveway that exited onto Telford Street, one block east of Smith. “Head to Flowy’s.”

  “They probably have a car on Telford, too.” Rob sighed and put on his old leather jacket. “I’ll go take care of it. I mean, these fucking stupid people, I just can’t stand stupid people . . .”

  Before his friends could stop him, Rob was outside knocking on the driver’s-side window of the car. The window lowered halfway. Curtis and Tavarus watched. The street was deserted.

  Rob was bent over, his head just outside the opening in the window. His hands made wide gestures on either side of his body. The head inside the car, presumably Boobie’s, was shaking from side to side, then nodding up and down. They heard garbled voices. Rob’s remained genial. Then Boobie laughed.

  The window lowered all the way, and Boobie’s arm extended toward Rob. The only reason Curtis and Tavarus knew there was not a loaded gun fixed to the end of that arm was that Rob took it in his own, forearms forming an inverted V with the hands locked at the thumbs. Their other hands gripped one another’s shoulders. Rob took a hit from the joint inside the car, and the vehicle pulled out as he turned back to the house.

  “Damn, it’s freezing out,” he muttered when he came inside.

  “What was that?” Curtis asked.

  “It’s all good,” Rob said. He strolled back through the kitchen and made himself a screwdriver from the 1.5-liter bottle of Smirnoff on top of the refrigerator. Then he grabbed the gas mask, put it on, and went back downstairs.

  THE FOLLOWING SPRING was his last at St. Benedict’s, and the feeling was similar to that which had marked our final semester in college: a mixture of nostalgia for the past and excitement about the future as he performed the tasks he’d performed each day for four years, tasks he would never perform again. He went on his last water polo tournament weekend and stayed up in the motel room he shared with Coach Ridley, watching action movies and putting off the moment when one of them had to check on the players’ rooms. He taught his last classes on Darwinian evolution, recessive genes, and cellular structures of plants. He sat through his last faculty meetings and pulled his last students aside in the hallways to drill the importance of discipline. He attended his last senior banquet, listened to the last Presidential Award winner give a speech to parents, teachers, and guests. As in most years, Charles Cawley was one of those guests.

  Rob had seen Mr. Cawley a few times during his teaching career, usually at homecoming and the senior banquet. They had always made a point of speaking with one another, but these had been increasingly distant, at points awkward, conversations as Rob had become more and more aloof. After the speech at the 2007 banquet, Mr. Cawley approached Rob’s table, as he had done Rob’s senior year nine years earlier. Rob stood up, shook his hand, and said, “Hey, Mr. Cawley, how’s it going?”

  “How’s it going with you?” Mr. Cawley replied.

  “Getting by.”

  “Friar Ed told me that your father passed. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And I understand you’re leaving the school?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what are your plans?”

  “Grad school.”

  “Oh, which one? I’m curious.”

  “Not sure yet. Still working on it.”

  Mr. Cawley looked into Rob’s eyes and understood that the young man was saying this only because he was supposed to. He saw something more in those eyes: anger. The emotion wasn’t nakedly apparent, but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia. He remembered when he’d offered to pay Rob’s tuition at this very event, in this very gymnasium—an offer he’d never made to any student before or since. As a financial master, Mr. Cawley looked at the world in terms of investments, of risk and reward. In 1998, the “investment” in Rob had struck him on paper as one of the lowest-risk and the highest-return; he saw no possible downside in giving this rare boy the slight push (Yale’s four-year tuition of $140,000 being slight for a bank CEO worth nine figures) he needed to reach the pinnacle for which he was already headed. Almost a decade later, as Rob broke off eye contact to gaze down at the floor as if there were a pit between them, Mr. Cawley understood that a life wasn’t lived on paper. He was not disappointed so much as confused, and he opted not to inquire further into what exactly had happened to Rob’s psyche between Yale graduation and now. He wanted to spare himself the sting of his own poor judgment. This conversation was the last he ever had with Rob.

  The fact was that Rob hadn’t filled out any grad school applications. He’d been too busy over the last few months poring over real estate information, and all the study had led him to the conclusion that Newark and the Oranges were not the places to invest in property right now. Cory Booker’s ambitions, predictably, were expensive, and the mayor had already installed an 8.3 percent hike on property taxes to help pay for them, the largest such increase in the city’s history. From his experience managing the Greenwood property, he knew that finding tenants with the credit to make security deposits was hard enough, and extracting rent from them on time was harder still. Even so, the average property value remained in the high five figures to low sixes, inflated by their proximity to so many well-off neighborhoods just beyond. Profit margins were thin, and effort expenditure was high. Lenders were hard to deal with, suspicious and often crooked. Jackie had been right: buying property in the neighborhood where he’d grown up was a bad idea. So he looked elsewhere, and he landed on Ohio.

  A few of his aunts and uncles lived in and around Cleveland. Rob had visited many times, and he’d seen an opportunity: modest houses on decent plots in diverse working-class neighborhoods where the economy was driven by historically stable manufacturing companies. Newark had been just like that, once, before Rob’s time. He’d been making weekend trips to the area to do title research in the records offices, make connections among the lending community, and prospect houses in person. Home values in many of these exurb communities fell as low as the mid five figures. The people who wanted to live there tended to have stable jobs and families. Money was still easy enough to come by. As a starting point for Peace Realty, the location made sense.

  But all the traveling had been expensive, and would become more so once he actually established a presence. Rob was naturally frugal; he always had been. He hated paying $300 for a ninety-minute flight, hated renting cars, hated paying more than $100 a
night for dingy hotel rooms. Above all, he hated the fact that nine months after having established Peace Realty as his next career move, he hadn’t actually accomplished anything—and so he would need a paying job to float him in the interim between leaving St. Benedict’s and profiting off his first group of properties.

  Rob did end up going on the Appalachian Trail hike early that summer. He took the position in the back of the line to prod the stragglers. He helped with tent setup, cooked beans and rice over campfires, and led circular conversations about goal setting as the logs broke down. Mostly he walked alone through the quiet forest, appearing pensive and often unapproachable. The hike itself was uneventful, one of the easiest they’d ever had. When the bus picked them up at the Delaware Water Gap, Rob was given a send-off in the form of an ovation and a school T-shirt.

  An hour later, the group disembarked on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in downtown Newark, filthy and weary, and the students scattered toward their parents’ waiting cars, and the teachers went to the parking garage to head home to their families. Rob lingered in and around the school for a few more hours. He went to the science offices to make sure his stuff was all cleared out. He went to the pool to check his coach’s locker and take a shower after ten days on the trail. Then he went, almost immediately, to his new job at the Newark International Airport.

  From left to right: Rob Peace, Curtis Gamble, Shariff Upton (one of Rob’s high school water polo coaches), Drew Jemison, and Julius “Flowy” Starkes. At house parties like this one in East Orange, the Burger Boyz could travel back to simpler times in high school.

  Part V

  Baggage

  Rob visiting Pula, Croatia, for the second time.

  Chapter 12

  THE SKIN OF his face and forearms had darkened to an inky hue. The sun bore down directly overhead, its heat absorbed by the asphalt underfoot to the point where the rubber soles of his work boots softened and began adhering to the ground. At its peak, the temperature on the tarmac could reach upward of 120°, and the heat became locked between the blacktop and the haze of thick exhaust fumes firing out of the jet engines as they endlessly jockeyed around him. Rob’s bright orange vest called to mind his father’s prison uniform during those first three years at Essex County. During the most heavily trafficked hours, he wore noise-canceling earmuffs, but he preferred not to. In the tall windows of the terminal one story above, he could see the travelers waiting for their planes, listening to music or pecking on laptops, young children with faces pressed against the glass in awe of the massive vehicles that would carry them into the sky. Below the terminal, on ground level, Rob hefted their distended suitcases, their golf clubs and strollers and duffels, into the cargo hold.

  “Yo, Peace.”

  “Whassup, Peace?”

  “Need you over here, Peace.”

  His coworkers were almost all men, typically broad men with hoarse voices who had been doing this work a long time. They had their systems and their silent language; they knew how to move the bags fast enough to satisfy the gate attendants upstairs but slowly enough so as not to faint from exhaustion. A careful efficiency governed their work, a weighing of the most important commodity in the airport, time, against the most important commodity of the laborers, stamina. Rob fit in seamlessly, almost anonymously. He didn’t complain—in fact, he rarely spoke at all on the job. During breaks, he typically read alone in the employee lounge, or took a cigarette to the subterranean parking lot outside the terminal set aside for staff smokers. While working, he was strong and tireless, not susceptible to the general stress that trickled down from the dispatchers constantly barking from the control tower. Most people rattled easily at first due to the unceasing chorus of hurry it up, hurry it up, hurry it the FUCK up. Others became mean and irritable. Peace, which was the name by which he was known, struck others as being very chill; he was simply there, on time, making sure the work got done but never putting his personality forward beyond the work. He was the kind of guy you wanted in this arena, especially in the heat of the 2007 summer: muggy, stagnant, unrelenting.

  “You didn’t go to college so you could carry people’s luggage,” Jackie said, not sniping necessarily but simply telling him the truth. “You don’t even need a high school diploma to do this job.”

  Hearing her say this over and over—her jaw set and thrust forward, her tone objectively observant—was the reason he found himself coming around Chapman Street less and less often since Continental had hired him. At first he’d replied aggressively with various versions of, “I’m the one trying to make ends meet around here, and that wasn’t going to happen on a teacher’s salary.” And these exchanges became real arguments, the kind that flushed their faces with blood and urged them harder and deeper into one another’s weakest points. Her debating points were logical and immediate: he was a Yale graduate, a scientist, a teacher, one who had benefited from the sacrifices of others, so what the hell was he doing working the lowest-level job in the entire airport? His were more abstract: he had a plan that one day would make sense to her, and in the meantime he was a grown man who had the right to make his own decisions—decisions, he was quick to remind her, that had historically turned out well. Then there were the wages, the benefits, the liberation of his mind that the manual labor allowed. In essence, he’d swapped mental wear and tear for physical. When he was a kid, before St. Benedict’s or Yale, an airline job would have been seen as a solid career path, as it was for his cousin Nathan. In his evolving view, the fact that he’d gone to those schools and accomplished those things didn’t need to complicate what life had once been about: the simplicity of providing for oneself, without expectations. At a certain point, he couldn’t explain these feelings to his mother; they came off as defensive, which was a platform Rob hated to stand on.

  When her son left, Jackie would sit on the front porch, stewing and chain-smoking in the dusky summer light. Her frustration had little to do with disappointment but rather with fear. She was afraid for her headstrong son, because no matter how articulately Rob spun his circumstances, she knew what almost forty years of manual labor felt like (terrible) and what it earned you (very little). Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments—as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligation to his own talent. In that rebellion, she saw a young man who was confused and upset that his life wasn’t stacking up to be what he and everyone around him had always assumed it would. In short, she saw weakness. Rob’s extreme and not always coherent argumentativeness, which deployed in force whenever she brought the subject up, supported her view. His whole life he’d listened to her, whether she was complaining about work or pressing through the tricky economics of paying for high school; by listening in his gentle way, he’d made things okay. He’d been her sounding board, her life partner, her heart. Now, at age twenty-seven, when he should have been thinking about starting his own family, he was sassing her like a child. Whatever future he saw for himself right now, however vividly he saw that future, its images lay beyond the reach of her bewildered eyes, even if those eyes were literally and figuratively shortsighted. Jackie was almost sixty years old. Though she had never known about Rob’s second job, she might have found some solace in the fact that, as he’d done during his last career shift at St. Benedict’s, he’d stopped selling drugs for the moment.

  In addition to being able to give out buddy passes, Continental employees themselves flew for free on standby—a fundamental component of Rob’s short-term plan. He had gotten the job through Nathan, who worked in the control tower as a kind of runway manager, tracking incoming planes and moving the tarmac workers around from gate to gate to accommodate them. Nathan and Rob had recently traveled to Amsterdam together. During that week of excess, Rob had learned that as long as employees logged their monthly quota of 160 hours worked, they could go anywhere at any time. No longer did Rob have to wait for national holidays to make his sorties to
Cleveland and Orlando to prospect properties; no longer did he have to hustle in order to afford the tickets. The airline had thousands of employees at Newark International, and the supervisors were generally bottom-line types. The attitude was: get your work done, doesn’t matter how. Weeknight shifts were preferred, because there was less runway traffic and the air was cooler, so it was relatively easy for Rob to trade nights for days and weekends, transactions he treated like any other form of dealing. He front-loaded his months with double and even triple shifts so that he could clear space to travel, and to further the cause of Peace Realty.

  By the end of his first summer working for Continental, he had narrowed his target neighborhoods down to three in Cleveland and two in south Florida. A $10,000 down payment on a property there would require a monthly mortgage payment of roughly $400. If he could pin down four houses, he would be paying a total of $1,600 each month, which was only marginally more than the house on Greenwood Avenue was bringing in. The challenge was to find properties in relatively good condition so that the renovations wouldn’t put him underwater. “I don’t need to be replacing no more damn boilers,” he said to Tavarus. He’d known that these stipulations would be harder than they sounded, but he didn’t know how hard they would actually be.

  Most of the available properties Rob could afford had suffered some form of neglect. Even for a middle-class family with steady factory income in Ohio, avoiding maintenance costs was always easier than addressing them. And by the time the family had saved up enough to pay for a major repair, they were probably in a position to move to a better neighborhood anyway. What they left behind were shorted-out lumps of electrical wires stapled into the crawl spaces, rot, rodent and insect infestations, cracked foundations, asbestos and radon and mold, water damage. Rob would spend four-day weekends going from house to house, crouching in the crawl spaces with a flashlight to look at water pipes and gas lines, swearing at the rats. At night, he would mutter on the phone to friends, “How is it possible that not a single fucking person in America knows how to respect a goddamn house?” And on the rare occasion when he did find an ideal property, he would lose it to the competition—real estate prospectors with the exact same idea, who had the benefit of operating locally and with far more liquid cash to invest. At the end of these trips, he would disembark at Newark International, pull his small rolling suitcase through the terminals, and try to ignore the families of hyped-up children leaving for summer vacation, the businessmen in suits walking very fast while thumbing their cell phones, the students with gigantic canvas duffels heading off to college. Often, he would just go straight to work, with two weeks of sixteen-hour days ahead of him to make up for the fruitless ventures.