The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  Life was supposed to be easier. This current ran beneath all our laughter about college and weddings and pregnancy, and it rose to the surface when I mentioned that my second novel had failed to find a publisher—more than two years of work, wasted—and that my third was losing steam (I mentioned this self-effacingly, with a shrug and a smile that suggested old clichés of the journey, not the destination, being what mattered). The side gigs I took copyediting self-published books that would never be read barely contributed to our income, let alone our future that we hoped would involve children. The current rose again when Ty tried to explain the economics of his and Raina’s career trajectory: the half million dollars of student debt they now carried between them, the unlikelihood of being placed in residencies in the same city when they graduated, the ultimate aim to open a dermatology practice in Kansas City, so her family could help with child care, which would be difficult because the market there was saturated. We weren’t speaking out of self-pity so much as presenting facts, and though none of us mentioned it outright, the facts spoke of something alarming about the world in which we lived and the generation we were a part of: among the four of us we shared over twenty years of education at Ivy League schools, and we were all motivated and hardworking, and none of us were currently able to make life function beyond the short term. As Ty said at one point near the end of dinner, “It’s like, what the fuck?”

  As they left with their daughter, we swore that we would figure out some way to have a reunion with Rob. He was missed that night.

  “What would Rob have told us during the pity party?” I asked.

  “Rob would have told us to quit being a bunch of bitches,” Ty replied.

  Before we went to bed later, Rebecca told me, “Make sure you follow up on that reunion with Rob.”

  “Sure, sure,” I replied.

  “Seriously, you should do that. It’s not right that you haven’t seen him in three years.”

  “I know.”

  But like so many promises made to oneself, that, too, was quickly forgotten.

  ROB AND TAVARUS, after many months of loose-ended talk, came up with a new vision for Peace Realty, which involved the Section 8 housing program in the city. Tavarus knew all about this domain, having grown up in and around its living spaces. In his admittedly biased opinion, the program was nothing more than a scam in which suburban landlords charged the city of Newark premium rents so that struggling families could live in severely neglected apartments. In the meantime, the Great Recession had begun to wreak havoc on the outlying neighborhoods. Just as Jackie had noticed the For Sale signs sprouting weedlike around Newark during the white flight of the ’60s and ’70s, Tavarus and Rob witnessed a new flourishing of abandoned, foreclosed homes. The encroaching blight was personal to them. These were the blocks they called home. They watched as properties—seven or eight in a block in the poorest stretches—first went dark in the windows, then were stapled with red-inked city housing forms, then grew waist-high weeds in the yard now surrounded by a chain-link fence, then had the windows smashed—by homeless people looking for shelter, or junkies looking for a place to shoot up, or looters scavenging pipes and appliances to sell for scrap—and then, in the final throes of this slow demise, had coffinlike boards replace the windows. The process affected them deeply, particularly when they’d known the former occupants, which they often did, and more so when those occupants had children, which they often had.

  In their imaginings, the city would sell Peace Realty a few of these abandoned homes at a wholesale rate in the neighborhood of $20,000. They would themselves invest an additional $15,000 to $20,000 in renovations to bring them to a suitable standard far above the Section 8 code requirements. Once fixed up, they would sell these holdings back to the city at around $50,000 to $75,000, still below market rate, and the properties would be incorporated into the Section 8 program as owned homes rather than rented apartments. The way they saw it, the city would be saving money overall by not having to pay premium rents, a few families would have a chance for stability, and Rob and Tavarus would be making anywhere between $10,000 and $25,000 profit—a negligible amount for a typical real estate firm but a life-changing income for the Burger Boyz. If the first round turned out successfully, they would have leverage to expand the enterprise, and soon they would be making six figures a year. That was a career, and one they could feel good about.

  Tavarus was trying to earn a proper living. He’d gotten enough money together to open a small lunch spot in Montclair serving up egg sandwiches and burgers and grilled cheese. His older brother, an ex-con, worked the grill. Tavarus was waking up at five each morning to open the place for the early commuters, and he stayed until seven or eight in the evening, at which point he came back to 34 Smith Street, where he and his family were now living on the second floor, to hang out with his son for a few minutes and then collapse into bed beside Darlene. He knew now what Jackie’s life had been like during Rob’s youth, spending all day on her feet and the rest of her time parenting. He also knew that it was no way to make a living. The profit margin was 2 percent on fare priced in the $5 range, and he’d been in the red for the first six months. Though he was just now breaking even, and the feeling of running a business that involved interacting with neighborhood people was positive, a café was never going to support his family.

  “No one’s ever gonna give shit to a nigger like you.” So said Flowy, with regard to the real estate proposal Rob and Tavarus were writing together. He wasn’t being dismissive; he just wanted to remind his friends that the deck was stacked against them, and stacked high. Flowy still dreamed of saving up a few thousand dollars to move out of Newark. For now, he was most contented when he was just driving around the city in his preciously maintained ’96 Ford Bronco. He took pride in knowing all the streets by heart, able to flow, as ever.

  He wasn’t alone in his thinking when it came to the business plan. The majority of the observers in their circle treated Rob and Tavarus’s talk of becoming Robin Hood–like figures in the real estate market with a smirk, and maybe a comment such as Flowy’s. They pointed to Rob’s dreadlocks, Tavarus’s scimitar-shaped sideburns, their clothes, their language, their tattoos. The image of these two men sitting in a conference room with the city’s urban planners incited laughter. And that meeting could happen only after they’d brought serious investors on board to loan them the seed capital.

  “But what you don’t understand,” Tavarus replied, “is that this isn’t even money to people like that. A hundred grand for our first five properties? These people shit a hundred grand. And then there’s our ace card.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Shawn Peace”—in East Orange, Rob was still tagged by his middle name. “He went to Yale U. They have no choice but to listen to what he says.”

  “You don’t think they’re gonna ask why he works at an airport?” (Rob was not present for this particular exchange; if he had been, the comment would have been phrased more gingerly, or more likely not voiced at all.) “You don’t think that’s a red flag?”

  “It’s all about the business plan,” Tavarus replied. “They just have to read that, meet us, see that we’re smart people. No one reads résumés anyway.”

  “No one reads business plans. You’re gonna have to sell that shit yourselves.”

  Tavarus and Rob had already put together a rough list of target investors, most of them St. Benedict’s alumni who could be reached through Friar Leahy. And they labored over their written business proposal. They knew that with minimal entrepreneurial experience—a short-order burger joint and a single owned property between the two of them—the document had to be close to perfect. They spent any spare daytime hours in the downtown Hall of Records researching the history of the Section 8 program as well as the property values in target areas. At night, they worked at the kitchen table on Smith Street, writing and revising and haggling over the fine points.
/>
  “I don’t know if we should use ‘exponential’ here,” Rob said.

  “Why not? Exponential is good. That’s a word they want to see.”

  “It’ll look naïve. The growth we’re aiming for isn’t ‘exponential’ per se. It’s a steady increase.” Rob drew an exponential curve swooping upward toward infinity, and then, beneath it, drew the actual projection in his mind, a clean line slanting upward with a 30 percent grade.

  “Did you just use the term ‘per se’?”

  Curtis, Drew, and Flowy were heartened to see this despite their doubts regarding the endeavor’s viability: the two men hunched over a mat of splayed paper covered in red pen marks, kneading their temples, running on fumes, focused on a goal. They looked activated. The nightly scene reminded them of high school, when all five of them gathered at the table or in the basement to do the same thing, looking just as worn-out while doing it. Back then, they’d worked over Mrs. Gamble’s casseroles and cans of grape soda. Now, it was take-out barbeque and vodka. Despite their skepticism, they dared to permit themselves to hope that this idea, after all the past ideas, might work. They would have loved nothing more than for at least two of the five of them to succeed at something.

  RoB SAT BACK from his third serving of pasta at Raquel’s table. She’d just thrown an impromptu dinner party for him and Isabella Peretzian, a classmate from Yale. Mesh trays of cooling cookies and biscotti covered every available surface of the apartment, the baked goods cut and decorated to resemble the legs of burlesque dancers. After giving birth, Raquel had decided not to return to her job at Sony. She was trying to become a professional baker instead, selling artfully crafted desserts.

  Isabella’s father had worked in foreign service. She was a smart, worldly girl of Armenian descent. While at Yale, she’d chosen to focus much of her academic and social life on black culture, particularly hip-hop music. Now she wrote music reviews for websites like allhiphop.com, and she spent nights dancing at clubs that were out of even Raquel’s league. In college, during the few times they’d hung out, Isabella had seen Rob as a reserved and confident man: an authentic representation of the world that, for reasons she couldn’t explain, fascinated her. And as they talked through the meal tonight, the admiration she’d tendered in college welled up once more. Whereas Oswaldo had come to see Rob as immobile and in some ways pathetic, Isabella couldn’t help seeing him as fundamentally “real,” airline job and all, harboring no aspirations to be anyone other than who he was and had always been.

  The baby cried, and Rob accompanied Raquel into the nursery to check on Felix. He stroked the tiny head while Raquel reswaddled the blanket, and he said, “It’s all good, little man. It’s all good.” Raquel watched the expression on his face and did not understand why he didn’t have a child of his own, a person capable of focusing all the love and caretaking instincts that Rob had always dispersed thinly among his friends and family, many of whom (she felt) didn’t necessarily deserve it. She giggled.

  “What are you laughing at?” he asked.

  “Just you.”

  “Why me? I’m trying to help.”

  She lowered her voice to a low grumble. “I’m Rob, the big man, the tough guy, but deep down I’m a big fat softie.” In fact, she’d laughed because she’d been picturing Rob with a little girl in his arms, crushingly in love even as he complained about no sleep.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Someday there will be some little Robs running around, raising hell. You wait and see.”

  Later, Isabella and Rob were sitting in his car on 119th Street so that they could listen to a new hard-core rap group called Slaughterhouse without waking the baby. They talked about music. Back in college, Rob had schooled her on songs by M.O.P. and Jay-Z. But that had been years ago, and at this point very few people could keep up with her when it came to the bass lines and turns of phrase in hip-hop. She wanted to impress him with how far she had come in their shared domain. Rob was mostly concerned with the downhill slide of this music in general, the “selling out” of artists who had once nourished him and now were angling hip-hop toward the shallow, popped-out style of Justin Timberlake.

  “It’s becoming unrelatable,” he said.

  “Yes,” Isabella agreed. “Most of it is wack now.”

  He sighed. “So, damn, what am I supposed to listen to?” She recommended Roc Marciano, an up-and-comer from Long Island, whom he hadn’t heard of. Rob promised to check him out. Then he sat there, staring forward at the dark stretch before them. A block and a half away, headlights flashed past in both directions on the FDR, beyond which the city opened up over the East River, peaceful and at ease.

  “You need a ride?” he asked.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Nah, I got you.” He drove her to her boyfriend’s apartment in Harlem, which was convenient because he had drop-offs to make in the same neighborhood. He’d begun using a portion of the marijuana he’d been bringing back from Miami for his own dealings, to make a little money through a few long nights.

  When neither Isabella nor Ina panned out romantically for Rob, the letdowns occurred despite Raquel’s hopes and efforts. When Rene Millien did pan out for him, in the fall of 2010, the relationship blossomed despite Raquel’s severe reservations.

  They met at Raquel’s thirtieth birthday party, at a baroque-style performance space in SoHo complete with a red stiletto leather chair on which PG-13-rated lap dances were given. Rene lived in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and worked as a digital artist. She had tight coils of dark hair down past her shoulders and a soft, freckled, light-skinned face. Where Rob’s sensibilities trended toward scientific analysis—treating life as an equation to be solved—Rene was visually minded. Whether in spite of or because of their contrasting perceptions, they were in sync that night as Rob “laid down a rap.” They remained so when they encountered each other at a dinner on 119th Street later that month, and again at ­Felix’s fifth birthday party. Rob brought Tavarus’s son Christopher along with him, and Raquel noticed how good he was to the boy, coaching him about manners and playing with others. She also noticed Rob and Rene pairing off together away from the group, laughing in the corner.

  “I’m sorry,” Raquel told Rob once he came to her apartment a few weeks later and formally unveiled the relationship. “You know you’re like my brother, but Rene is my girl and I’m just very protective of her.” Rene’s roommate and best friend had recently died of AIDS; she had been beside him in the hospital as he’d drawn his last breaths. She was still hurting deeply, and Raquel didn’t think she needed to be “Robbed” in the wake of her loss.

  “I’ll take care of the woman,” Rob said. He was eating soup at Raquel’s kitchen table.

  “She’s been through a lot.”

  He looked up from the bowl, locked eyes with her for a moment, and said, “So have I.” And Raquel saw it then in his face, the briefest reveal of what Rob had strived always to hide from her and so many others: what he’d been through and how it clung to him. She’d known of the weight he carried, but she’d never actually seen it until now, after a dozen years of knowing him. Before he left, she gave him her blessing.

  Rene lived in a narrow railroad apartment on the second floor of a brownstone. The walls were covered with photos, hundreds of them, colorfully doctored on her sophisticated desktop computer. Some were random street scenes. Others were of her family, Jamaica, friends growing up, designs she created in the vein of Salvador Dalí. Rob loved being in that room with her. And she was struck by his willingness to come there, sometimes driving across Manhattan from Newark in the middle of the night—with the $12 tolls—just to lie beside her for a few hours before he headed down the BQE and over the Verrazano for a seven a.m. shift at the airport. She offered to meet him in New Jersey more than once. She would have an easier time hopping on the Path train than he would inching under and over the rivers.

  He always shook his hea
d. “No. This way is better. Except for the fucking parking tickets. What is it with Brooklyn and parking tickets?”

  “There are signs, you know, that tell you where to not park.”

  He made a guttural uggghh sound.

  More than the time he spent driving to reach her, she was surprised by his tenderness, particularly regarding the friend she had lost. Over the first weeks of their relationship, as she rested her head against Rob’s chest with his strong arm wrapped around her, crying sometimes, she spent hours talking about him. And Rob lay beside her, listening always, recording every detail, and every so often offering the perfect word or gentle tightening of his embrace to soften her pain.

  “Just move the plane,” hissed the dispatcher’s voice.

  “The luggage crew’s not here. I don’t know where the hell they are.”

  “Get it done.”

  From his seat in the small super tug, Rob was looking up at the massive 777, which more than three hundred international passengers were waiting to board at another gate. The luggage from the previous flight had all been unloaded. The problem was that no one had disengaged “the can”—the giant conveyer belt that carried bags from the loading carts to the cargo hold twenty feet above—from the aircraft. And now the luggage crew seemed to have taken a break; Rob couldn’t get a response to his repeated pleas over the radio. His partner that day stood to take care of it, but Rob stopped him and climbed out of the truck himself. “Not like I didn’t do this shit for two years.”

  Thanksgiving of 2010 was not far away, and a cold front had swept over the airport. With his head burrowed into the collar of his jacket, he climbed to the console halfway up the can’s stairway and backed the entire machine a few feet away from the aircraft. Then he flicked the switch to close the plane’s cargo bay doors. Maybe he realized his mistake right away, maybe he didn’t. He’d forgotten to fold down the ­industrial-strength steel rails that jutted up on either side of the conveyer. Consequently, the outer edge of the plane’s bay door descended against one of the upright rails on the can. If he’d backed the luggage machine away two more inches, there would have been enough room to spare. As it was, the hard materials collided, and the hydraulic motor that operated the cargo bay door groaned for a moment before Rob flicked the switch to cut the power.