The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  A week into his first visit, he told Hrvoje that he would move here someday and began talking about some scheme he’d conceived of to sell ice makers here, since no one seemed to have them.

  “NO, ROB,” INA SAID. “Fuck no.”

  For over a year, he and Ina had been going to a local gun range in her neighborhood in Biscayne. They would wear the earmuffs and line up in adjacent slots to have accuracy contests. They would whoop and taunt one another throughout the shooting practice, the sharp scent of gunpowder filling their nostrils. In the fall of 2008, Rob convinced her to obtain a legal gun license. She didn’t understand why; guns and legality were not often linked in her neighborhood, and she had no desire to own one anyway.

  “Who knows when you might need it?” he’d replied. “Gets heavy where you live, and you don’t have an alarm. I worry.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Still, he’d made some kind of sense, and she’d gone ahead and gotten a license, with no intention of actually buying a gun.

  Then, very casually a few weeks later, Rob made a proposition: he’d give her the money to buy a few handguns in the $300 range, and she would then file a claim saying the guns had been stolen. In the meantime, he would sell them on the black market in Newark for double the price.

  A strange alchemy of confusion and anger coalesced within her, seeing how he had manipulated her over the last few months, edging her toward qualifying for gun ownership in the form of fun and protection, interspersing this with increasingly grave stories about his grandmother’s health expenses, and then putting her in the position of having to choose between his need for money and her own historically malleable morality.

  Over the past two years, she’d helped him network drug contacts around Miami. She hadn’t been involved in any commerce beyond those introductions, and she hadn’t thought twice about it. Marijuana was easy to compartmentalize as harmless, safer in many ways than cigarettes, an organic substance that offered a peaceful escape to a lot of people who depended on just that. Rob could be shady about that aspect of his life, and she’d come to feel that dealing was more of an addiction, or at least a habit, than the actual consumption of the drug. But he’d always protected her from what he did and had never seemed in over his head; he’d never put himself in a position from which he couldn’t also extricate himself.

  Guns were on the extreme opposite side of the spectrum. Guns were cold, hard objects whose sole purpose was lethality. Without the threat of death, a gun was useless. So she told him no and, additionally, to get the fuck away from her. He did not respond with anger, as she half expected. He didn’t attempt to reason her around to his perspective. He just nodded and said, “It’s all good,” and they resumed their day.

  For the next few Miami visits, she remained wary around him. She didn’t want to ask whether he’d found someone else to buy guns for him, but she desperately wanted him to confirm that he hadn’t, that her reaction had driven some increasingly needed good sense into him. She called a few of his friends in Newark and angled in loosely on the subject. No one had heard anything about gun dealing on his part. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything; Rob was good at nothing if not keeping his life compartmentalized.

  She had known him for six years now and was familiar with all of his triumphs and setbacks and dreams. She was also familiar with the fact that very few people in the world had the options that he had. She’d certainly known people, like her niece Raquel, who had come from difficult circumstances and gotten out of them spectacularly. In most cases, a definitively benign force had been present to enable the rise. Raquel’s mother had driven her fiercely to do well in school, such that high academic prowess had been the only option. Others had come upon money by luck, or had relatives acting as patrons. Rob had had none of those things. All he’d had was a home, and a harried home at that, paired with his own drive. What he’d achieved, he’d achieved almost exclusively on his own. And now he was throwing it all away on his own, too; he was focusing that unstoppable drive on the very thing that could ultimately stop him.

  Her heart ached over the fact that Rob’s life had come to this, and that he—the smartest and most expansive person she knew—failed to see the wrongness therein. The sheer stupidity that she was watching bloom in these increments took root in Ina’s head throughout that fall of 2008 and led to much self-reflection—and ultimately to an option she’d always considered but never taken seriously.

  That fall, Ina cut off her dreadlocks and enlisted in the navy. With her education, enlisting felt like the single permanent exit from the cycle of crime and immobility to which her relationships seemed inextricably linked, a link that was clarified by Rob’s desperate and dangerous behavior. The fact that her friend and sometime lover was trying to smuggle firearms made the decision an easy one.

  “There are three ways out of the world we grew up in,” Raquel told her aunt in an attempt to lessen the drama surrounding her decision. “I went domestic. You’re going military.”

  “What’s the third?” Ina asked.

  “The third is Rob’s way,” Raquel replied.

  When Rob saw Ina for the last time, in early January 2009, she was wearing her uniform under her combed shoulder-length hair. He whistled. “You look good all decked out.”

  “Don’t make fun of me. This is hard. You know how much I cried seeing my hair on the floor?”

  “I’m not making fun. I’m proud of you.” She could see that he was sincere.

  “I just want to change my life.”

  “You’re doing what you got to. I understand completely.”

  He gave her a strong hug before he left, first to make a pickup in ­Liberty City, then to get on a plane back to Newark. Three months later, after boot camp was complete, Ina went to Afghanistan.

  Before she left, she said to Rob over the phone, “You know what? I pray for you. I pray that you’ll be okay.” She’d built up courage to voice these words.

  “No, I pray for you,” he replied.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  At roughly the same time that Ina shipped overseas, in the spring of 2009, Rob was promoted at Continental, from luggage to the super tug crew, driving the small but powerful vehicles—really just engines with two seats carved out—that towed the planes between gates and runways. Senior managers at the airline had approached him a few times about moving to a better-paying and upwardly mobile administrative position where his résumé could be applied to better use; he’d always declined. Admin meant a desk. A desk meant a chair. A chair meant the end of his travels. But the super tugs appealed; the work was more stressful, but it paid better and big chunks of each shift were spent idling on the runway with his head buried in a book, waiting for clearance from dispatchers.

  Aside from Jackie, no one had asked Rob any serious questions about what exactly he was doing. If friends or family made an attempt, he would cut them off with opaque allusions to a larger plan, or even with a look that seemed to say, I’m the one who went to Yale, so trust me, I know what I’m doing. But his cousin Nathan, even though he’d helped Rob procure his original job at Continental, confronted him after the promotion. “Shawn,” he said, “if you keep going on like this, you’re going to be working for me the rest of your life. And there’s something wrong with that.” Rob just shrugged.

  During one work shift, he was paired with Julio Vega, the captain of the thirty-person tug crew. Rob was famous now for the effort he invested in traveling; in twelve years working at the airline, Julio figured he had traveled maybe a quarter of the amount that Rob had in his first twelve months. But other than that, he remained largely an unknown. He was fun to ride the super tug with, because of his jokes, but his presence brought a weight into the cramped vehicles, an uncomfortable reserve that made you feel like you’d better watch what you say. That quality could make eight hours feel like an awfully long time. Julio was reading a how-to book about financ
ial planning. He glanced over at Rob’s book, tucked discreetly on the far side of his lap. He saw a page filled with what looked like math problems, but with letters and runelike symbols where numbers should have been, alongside complicated geometric shapes.

  “What the hell are you reading?” Julio asked.

  “P-chem,” Rob mumbled, turning the book away. “Physical chemistry.”

  “Why?”

  “Just trying to stay up to speed, you know.”

  “Peace, who the fuck are you?”

  Before the dispatcher told them to move again, Julio learned where Rob had gone to college and that he’d been a science teacher. Rob told him to keep that on the down low, but Julio couldn’t help propagating the news—it was too damn strange, funny even. A low-key movement began to start calling him the “Professor,” like his preschool teachers once had. The glare Rob gave in response cut the effort off at the head with the surety of a guillotine. Then they called him Peace again and let him read his books without hazing.

  “I don’t get it, if I’d gone to Yale, I’d be fucking proud of it. I’d be telling everyone.” Rob and Lisa Wingo were in the smoking section of the garage, both freezing. Lisa worked at the check-in gates. She was five one and stout, and she spoke fast and constantly. When she wasn’t talking, she was laughing. They’d become friends when Rob had said, “You don’t shut the fuck up much, do you?”

  “I’m a single mother of a girl in middle school. If I shut the fuck up, she’ll start talking and I’ll never get a word in again.”

  When their shifts coincided, they’d have a drink afterward at a bar near the airport called Terminal One. He came by her apartment in Elizabeth fairly often and helped her daughter, Dawn, with homework. The girl was as sassy as they came, but when Rob was around, she would just stare fawningly at him while he guided her through fifth-grade reading lists and simple division. Like his father, Rob insisted on proper, legible handwriting. After bedtime, Rob would stay and drink and watch TV and usually sleep on the couch. He called Lisa “Oompa Loompa” for her particular shape; she called him “Predator” for his dreadlocks (the same name he’d divined for Ty’s girlfriend in college). He brought food, checked in often on the phone, and in many ways filled the gaping absence left by her daughter’s father. Rumors began among the smokers that they were dating. “I could never date that man,” Lisa replied. “We both like to needle each other too much. But someone should—he sure as hell is nice to have around.”

  More than a few workers at the airport talked behind Rob’s back, with a thick sense of schadenfreude, about the fact that a Yale grad had no business doing what he did, that he was taking a good job from someone who actually needed it, that his aloof demeanor was tied to the smugness of thinking he was better than everyone else, that he must be some kind of fuckup to have ended up where he was. Lisa knew that Rob was not smug, and she wanted to believe that this place was not where he’d ended up but rather where he was starting out. Tomorrow, or the day after that, or sometime very soon, he’d be gone, doing something far beyond the limited minds in the employee smoking area of Newark International. She looked forward to telling the “haters” what exactly that something was.

  She wondered often why he involved himself in her life, why he seemed so motivated to take care of her. She knew he had other responsibilities, his mother, his house, his vast network of friends and family, his long nights dealing drugs, his travel. But very few days passed without at least a text, even if that text originated in Croatia. Most men she’d known, both romantic and platonic, followed the same pattern of being around only until a more attractive situation than the single mother of a plucky adolescent living in an airport-adjacent neighborhood presented itself. Rob wasn’t drawing any tangible benefit from her; she wasn’t much of a cook, and he certainly wasn’t getting laid. Aside from her sense of humor that aligned closely with his, the transaction, as it were, felt lopsided. But still the months passed, and his affection for her family, if anything, grew—as did the weight that seemed to press always downward on his broad shoulders. And Lisa realized that Rob did mine value from her, and that evenings spent in her messy apartment doing fifth-grade homework and watching sitcom reruns were an escape for him. An escape from what, exactly, he would never let her know.

  Oswaldo Gutierrez knew. He was almost finished with med school at Penn, and he’d seen Rob plenty over the last few years, as Rob would loop through Philadelphia after visits to the Raymond brothers in Browns Mills. For the most part, these visits were easy. Together for a night, they could smoke and chill and just talk, complaining some, commiserating, thinking out loud. But as 2009 began, Oswaldo noticed a circular aspect to Rob’s speech and manners, a narrowing of vision in a man who, in college, had been more curious and knowledgeable than seemingly any of the five thousand Yale undergraduates surrounding him. Like the planes that circled above the airport when the ground crew caused runway delays, he fell into a holding pattern of carping about his life while hunched over a joint on Oswaldo’s sofa: tenants, rent, Carl, women, work, money, even his mother. His laments were small and tiresome—this motherfucker . . . that motherfucker . . . I’m so tired of all this stupid-ass shit, man—and yet they instilled a deep sadness in Oswaldo as he, in the analytical way of the psychiatrist he was studying to become, isolated the man he had first encountered at Yale and placed him alongside the one bemoaning the annoyances of his life here, now, seven years later.

  Oswaldo had been there for Rob through all of the experiences that now separated those two versions of the same man, and unlike most of Rob’s current friends, he was linked into the space that college inhabited in Rob’s psyche. He could trace the many events and patterns that, though sometimes innocuous in the happening, had accumulated with a rigid scientific surety to produce this man, whose generosity and intelligence were matched only by his flaws.

  “All I’m asking for is some numbers. Nothing on you. Just people to call.”

  Rob was asking Oswaldo for drug contacts in Philadelphia, perhaps classmates of his who smoked, so that he could hustle there.

  “Get the fuck out,” Oswaldo replied. He opened the door.

  “Damn,” Rob said. “So it’s like this now?”

  “Yeah,” Oswaldo replied. “It’s like this.”

  And Rob left, rolling his eyes like this scene was just part of a comedy in which he was the focal point of the farcical behavior of those around him. And Oswaldo understood now with a clarity he’d never had before that all of Rob’s troubles were self-inflicted—that on Yale graduation day Rob had stood within reach of everything he now didn’t have. Maybe Yale hadn’t guaranteed fame and wealth and general greatness, but it had ensured, at the very least, stability. Oswaldo had never been as smart as his friend, but he’d sorted his life out with the same odds against him. He was six months from earning an MD and had a probable job waiting for him near Boston counseling abused youths. He’d figured it out. And Rob was still clinging, after all these years, to the idea of being the Man. Oswaldo was no longer interested in seeing what that looked like up close.

  TY CANTEY’S DAUGHTER, Akira, was tottering around on the hardwood floor of our dining room in West Hollywood, giggling as she repeatedly attempted to grab hold of our dog’s ears.

  “Have you heard from Rob lately?” I asked.

  Ty, sitting beside his wife, Raina, leaned back and said with low-key regret, “I really haven’t, man. It’s hard to keep track of him, you know? Because he’s always traveling, and he’s always changing his fucking phone number.”

  “Is he on Facebook?” Rebecca asked.

  Ty laughed. “Rob would never join Facebook. That would be funny, though.”

  “If you track down his number, would you text it to me?” I asked. “I haven’t seen that guy since our wedding.”

  “That was a fun wedding,” Ty said. (I had already roasted him with the story of my bachelor party,
when we’d been standing on a street corner debating what to do next, and Ty had made the decision for everyone by saying, “I took the Fung Wah bus down here, motherfucker, and I am going to see some titties.”)

  “Not as fun as yours,” Rebecca replied. Ty and Raina had had a Hare Krishna ceremony in her hometown of Kansas City, and we recalled the white man, bald except for a two-inch-long gray ponytail, singing endless verses of “Hare hare kriiiishnaaaa” as a stall tactic since Ty, when the wedding was supposed to begin, had still been back at his in-laws’ house in his underwear, looking for a tie.

  Ty and his family were in Los Angeles for Raina’s fifth-year reunion at USC, and we’d had them over for dinner at our small one-bedroom. We felt oddly grown-up, having a dinner party with my old roommate: late-night eater of soy burgers, wearer of FUBU, now on the verge of becoming a real doctor. He’d opted out of the PhD component of his degree so he could get out of school and start earning money. Raina, a beauty and a pistol whom he’d met at Harvard Medical School, was pregnant with their second daughter (though that apparently hadn’t stopped her from hip-hop dancing for hours at the reunion the night before). I noticed my wife beside me staring at Raina’s belly. Attention had already been paid to that particular element, with congratulatory embraces, the females talking about morning sickness and maternity clothes, Ty looking shell-shocked as he tried to imagine a near future surrounded by three women, two of them under twenty months old. I knew very well the unavoidable gloom welling up in my wife, however; after three miscarriages and many tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt run up for fertility treatments, she had a hard time being in close proximity to people who bore children effortlessly, by accident. The concept of getting “knocked up” was one that my wife would never know.