by Jeff Hobbs
. I am seeking to increase my knowledge in this area for the purpose of addressing diseases like cancer and HIV.
The knowledge I gain from a [sic] earning a PhD will help me achieve my career objectives which include educating future scientists as a professor, becoming a principal investigator and continuing scientific research to better understand the mechanisms underlying the pathways of life. Given to [sic] my academic preparation, research experience, and desire to teach at the college level I feel that this is an attainable goal that would allow me to both pursue my passion and contribute to the betterment of society.
Isabella Peretzian read the unfinished draft Rob had sent her. He wouldn’t be able to enroll in graduate school for another year, but he wanted to have a head start on the applications so that they wouldn’t fall by the wayside again, as they had every year since 2007. He’d emailed the document to her beneath a message that read, Hey hun, You asked for it and here it is. Please be as harsh as you can possibly be. I tend to be fallin in love with sentences and will let shit ride just cuz. She marked a few typos and then, in keeping with her task, replied that she felt the references to his foreign travels could be pared down—or cut entirely—because they gave the impression of a certain wanderlust. Rob called her immediately, and his voice was testy. While still being perfectly grateful, he argued that these travels were a fundamental part of who he was, and if a graduate school program had a problem with that, then so be it. He felt strongly that altering these sentences would compromise his integrity. Isabella replied, “Okay, it’s fine, it was just a suggestion.”
Since his firing, Rob had been living off his rental income, plus unemployment checks of $412 a week. He was ashamed of those checks and the dependency they represented. But he took them out of their envelopes, deposited them, bought food for the house, paid attention to his grandmother, and maintained an uneasy truce with Jackie. On hiatus were the long nights on Smith Street with Tavarus, poring over their business proposal and planning a course of action to begin meeting with investors. Once again, he needed a job.
Jackie silently hoped that his firing from Continental would ultimately prove to be the best thing that had happened to her son since Charles Cawley approached him more than a decade ago. She knew that she had grounds to tell Rob, “I told you so.” She was not above saying such a thing in general, but she kept those inclinations contained. Seeing her son struggle was hard, and made harder by his silent, simmering mood. She would look at his face while he ate, or read, or watched TV and observe this dark, almost cold visage that was no longer capable of concealing his interior. No mother could easily endure watching her child in stasis—and particularly Jackie, who felt unequipped to offer any specific advice that might help him.
Only in groups was Rob fully himself, at least outwardly. To the extent that he could at the end of each day, he surrounded himself with people. On Thanksgiving, just weeks after he lost his job, he performed his usual holiday routine of house-hopping: Shannon Heggins’s to Lisa Wingo’s to his cousin Nathan’s to Victor’s aunt’s to Oswaldo Gutierrez’s family to Jackie’s to Smith Street and finally landing at Rene’s after midnight, eating full meals at each destination. Laughing throughout the day, he betrayed no trace of the most recent turn in his life, and except for his close friends, no one really knew.
“Cut off your dreads,” Oswaldo told him. “Get a suit that fits right, that’s not all baggy and hip-hop. Make eye contact. Don’t mumble, don’t swear, don’t talk around the topic. Act interested.”
“What does that mean?”
“When you’re not one hundred percent into something, you have a tendency to act above it all. Don’t do that. Interviewers can tell, and it pisses them off.”
Rob had called him in December, wondering why he couldn’t get hired. He’d interviewed at a handful of pharmacies along South Orange Avenue, for administrative positions at real estate firms, at a Merck plant in Rahway hiring bench positions, and he hadn’t heard back from any of them. He knew the fundamental reason: he was overeducated and underskilled, with a jarring résumé in which a laboratory stint had segued into a high school teaching job which had segued into airport manual labor which had ended in a controversial firing. Even Rob had trouble making sense of it, trying and failing to bend the facts into the representation of himself he desired to project. In the happening, each step had made sense to him; each had held a purpose, even if others had questioned what that purpose had been. But now, when those decisions were condensed into bullet points on a single sheet of white paper, they looked discordant, with none of the texture that had characterized the actual living of his life. In addition, and contrary to Oswaldo’s last bit of advice, Rob found it hard to be interested in the people interviewing him or the jobs he was interviewing for. He could avidly talk to any of his friends for hours about the simple minutiae of their lives, but he had trouble sitting through a twenty-minute job interview without becoming bored, and showing it.
And now Oswaldo, who had begun his first job counseling abused, impoverished children and teenagers in the Boston area, was telling him, basically, to stop being himself. What made the advice harder to digest was how sensible it was.
“Yeah,” Rob replied in a rare instance of refusing to argue with someone telling him something he didn’t want to hear. “Yeah, I get that.”
“I’ll come down this weekend. I’ll help you find a suit.”
“I can do that on my own,” Rob replied.
“You sure?” Oswaldo was not confident of Rob’s capacity to dress himself to code.
“Yeah. You got enough going on without having to shop with me like a girl.”
“Spend a little money. None of that discount crap. People can tell.”
“Money,” Rob replied resignedly.
Rob Peace, more than anyone else I’ve known, didn’t need money to be happy. His needs and wants were basic: sustenance, companionship, sex, music, marijuana, little else. He was content with his unit on Greenwood, during the various stretches in which he lived there. He’d never replaced the leather jacket Zina had given him as a freshman in college eleven years earlier. He liked eating rice and beans—he actually preferred it over heartier fare, when cooked with care, the way Oswaldo’s mother made it. At his core, he was indifferent to the American concept of success: owning nice things, vacationing at resorts, being the boss of others. By all accounts, he could have lived a happy life on a teacher’s salary, the way Coach Ridley, Friar Leahy, and many of his St. Benedict’s colleagues did. But Rob coveted money so that he could help other people materially and in doing so manipulate their perception of him.
He sought money because he wanted to be the Man. And the unemployment checks, which came to Chapman Street in the middle and at the end of each month, made him feel quite the opposite of that.
CHRISTOPHER RODE IN the front seat, which was illegal for a four-year-old, but Rob figured it was safer than the backseat because his car had no passenger-side airbags, and the front seats were the only ones with the diagonal chest straps. Since he wasn’t working, Rob had been picking Christopher up from preschool at one thirty each afternoon and taking him back to Smith Street.
Christopher was a sweet, quiet little guy. He was adept at entertaining himself for hours. He enjoyed being surrounded by the men like Rob constantly filing in and out of his home. He knew when he was welcome to hang out with them and when it was time to retreat upstairs. Rob always said that his godson had a “good head.” But he worried that the boy was on the soft side.
His worries were confirmed when Christopher confided that there’d been an altercation over a toy truck that morning, the same kind of altercation that occurred daily in thousands of preschools across the country: one kid was playing with something that a more forceful kid wanted to play with, and the forceful kid won out. Christopher asked if he should have hit the kid. The thought had occurred to him, but he’d restrained himself, and now he felt
ashamed—not for having been bullied, but for not having fought back.
“Nah,” Rob said. “You don’t want to be hitting anybody over something like that.”
“What should I have done, then, Uncle Shawn? Told the teacher?”
“Hell no,” Rob replied. “You do not want to be that guy.”
“So . . . what?”
“I think you did right in the situation by doing nothing, because if you do something, hit the kid or tell the teacher or whatever, it’s just going to define you, and then people just be looking at you and saying, ‘There’s the dude that hits people,’ or, ‘There’s the dude that tells the teacher.’ You lost the truck. Who gives a damn? It’s a toy truck. The important thing isn’t what you do, it’s who you are, and who your friends are. This little punkass you told me about, he’s not your friend. I know you got other friends, though.”
“Yeah.”
“Then you stay near them. Watch their backs, and they watch yours. Keep them close. Then nobody’s gonna mess with you.”
Tavarus laughed when Rob related the story that night.
“He’s a good dude,” Rob said.
“Yeah, he’ll be all right.”
“How does it make you feel, as a father, hearing stories like that?” Rob looked at Tavarus with real curiosity, something that had been missing from his face lately.
“You know, you get mad as hell, you want to strangle the little motherfucker that messes with your boy. But you can’t. So mostly you just remember what it was like when you were his age and be thankful he’s not dealing with anywhere close to what we had to deal with. You know, he doesn’t have to worry about getting stabbed over whatever truck he’s playing with. And then I think, yeah, maybe he could stand to be harder, but being hard doesn’t get you anywhere, not really.”
Rob recalled aloud the Maine retreat Tavarus had been on after freshman year of high school, and the call he’d made to Chapman Street following the fistfight over his footwear. “You were cussing, groaning, flexing those scrawny-ass chicken wings,” Rob said, laughing.
“I was mad as hell, man.”
“And I told you to calm down, didn’t I?”
“Yeah. Good words, too.”
“Sometimes,” Rob said, “I wish I was as smart now as I was back then.”
“You’re as smart, smarter even. It’s just that life was a lot simpler then.”
“Yeah. Didn’t seem that way at the time, but I guess it was.”
They sat and drank into the night, later joined by Curtis. Soon they were arguing about the identities and powers of certain Greek gods: Curtis thought that Hermes was the god of war; Rob told him that he was thinking of Ares, son of Zeus and Hera. A quick Google search confirmed Rob to be correct, as per usual, and the two friends lauded him for being able to access such useless knowledge after killing at least half a bottle of one-hundred-proof Smirnoff.
Rob drank plenty that fall. At bars like Passion, Slick’s, and A.S.H., he made a game of challenging friends to drink as many Long Island iced teas as he put down, which he liked to chase with “little beers,” a shot-size mixture of Licor 43 and Baileys. He was staying up late, until three or four in the morning, sometimes for weeks in a row. His friends thought this was fine. In their view, Rob was entitled to a wayward period, and they accommodated him, milking the long nights hanging out in bars or around the kitchen table or over a Monopoly board, with Rob neither rising early for work nor disappearing for weeks to some far-flung country. Outwardly, he seemed at ease, a capable man taking a minute to weigh his options. He did not seem like an unemployed and paralyzed person anesthetizing his problems with alcohol and weed, delaying the inevitable confrontation he would soon have to make with the decisions that had brought him to this circumstance and the decisions that would or would not free him from it.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Oswaldo Gutierrez quietly seethed. He talked to Rob often and continually counseled him. But now it was January 2011, two months after Rob’s firing, and he still hadn’t bought a suit. His voice was more often than not phlegmy and cracked, and he was stiff from sleeping on a friend’s couch while Oswaldo had already been working for six hours. Oswaldo knew who these friends were, and he knew that Rob was blinded in too many ways to their negative influence; Oswaldo saw these very same patterns in the teenagers he worked with. He remembered days when Rob had been a teacher and Oswaldo had still been wallowing in Newark himself, doing more or less what Rob was doing now. Back then, Rob’s car would break down often, and he’d called on Oswaldo to give him rides to and from work. Oswaldo would pick him up at Smith Street or some other house where people had gathered the night before. Bottles would be overturned on tables. Bodies would be sprawled on couches, some awake and already smoking weed. And later that day, when Oswaldo dropped Rob off again, the same people would be lying on the same couches. The immobility he observed in those moments, the languor that was nearly total, seemed to embody the thing that Rob had always proclaimed to disrespect above all: laziness. But Rob had never been able to see what Oswaldo saw, because he’d considered these people his friends, and his family.
What bothered Oswaldo more than anything else was the way these friends took from Rob, and many of them did so without reciprocating. Money actually concerned Oswaldo the least, because a guy like Rob would always be able to earn more in some capacity no matter how erratically he was behaving. More valuable was Rob’s time, and more valuable still was his positive energy. From experience, Oswaldo felt that the people Rob hung out with the most, including the Burger Boyz, took his time and replaced it with negativity, the feeling ingrained over generations that any path taken—whether college, real estate, the opening of a neighborhood café—would only loop back to the kitchen table on Smith Street, a blunt and some liquor to pass around. Their years at St. Benedict’s had buoyed this crew above that feeling for a time, but in the end the promise of better things to come had proved too hard to fulfill. In the meantime, Oswaldo remembered when Rob had first bought the house on Greenwood Avenue, the weekends spent fixing it up. Rob had called a lot of his people for help during those months, people he considered his best friends. Oswaldo had been the only one who’d ever shown up. And now he watched from afar as Rob’s days became weeks, weeks became months, and soon enough months would become years. The same inexorable movement of time had afflicted Oswaldo during the three years after college graduation. Resurrecting himself had been the hardest decision he’d ever made, but in retrospect it had simply been logical.
Rob had never seen, let alone heeded, that logic, and he wouldn’t listen now. Though Rob visited him in Cambridge every couple of weeks (Oswaldo’s fellow residents were enamored of him, after a few late nights at Harvard-area bars), Oswaldo still couldn’t offer advice deeper than what to wear and what not to say—and even that could make Rob angry.
He wished that Rob’s father were still alive, in which case Oswaldo would have sent Skeet a letter in prison framing Rob’s situation and explaining what guidance might help him achieve actual progress. If he could have used Skeet as a conduit, he truly believed that he could have motivated his friend to change. Few influences on earth were more powerful than that which a father had on a son.
“I just want to succeed,” Rob had told him years earlier, in 2006. They’d been driving up to Boston together. Rob had something like five pounds of marijuana in the trunk, and Oswaldo was composing a fictional short story in his head about what would happen if they were pulled over by police.
“You want to succeed in this new jack, fucked-up way,” Oswaldo replied. “You want to succeed in business, and as a dealer. That’s never gonna happen. You have to pick one. And I know which I’d choose.”
Rob wasn’t cold-blooded enough to be a truly successful drug dealer. Oswaldo had known people who were. Growing up, his uncle had been friends with a bona fide kingpin. The man lived in a three-story town hou
se on Bleecker Street, in Manhattan. He had a wife and children and a circle of friends to whom he was kind, loyal, and generous. He also wouldn’t have hesitated to put a bullet in the head of anyone who even obliquely crossed him—hence the wealth he possessed and, more important, the respect. Rob cared about people too much to move anywhere near that place. He cared about their stories, their families, their needs. He wasn’t dangerous or lethal.
Oswaldo had never said any of this to Rob. He had never said a lot of what he observed. Back then, there might have been a window in Rob’s consciousness through which these words could slip inside and gain purchase, illuminating the patterns. Now, five years later, that window seemed to be closed.
HE DIDN’T HAVE the money to invest in his own supply of marijuana. What he did have was the street cred of his Sour Diesel recipe. In December 2010, he leveraged that into a job working for a dealer named Amin, whom he knew through one of his old connects. Amin was Puerto Rican, in his thirties, a successful middleman who lived in a run-down bungalow in Weequahic to mask his considerable earnings, which he spread over a number of small business fronts. He was an Immaculate Heart of Mary alumnus, friendly and intelligent. He was gentle with his two Doberman pinschers, but like the dogs he could become sternly alert and threatening in a moment. For a stipend of $800 a month, Rob converted a few pounds of Amin’s weed into his hybrid Sour Diesel and delivered it to one of Amin’s supply outposts. This job was time-consuming and solitary but relatively simple. The true stress of it came from relinquishing control. Dealing drugs, while taxing on multiple levels, had always been the one thing Rob felt he could stop and start as he pleased and operate on the level that suited him. The money was earned and owned and spent by him alone. He’d always stayed under the radar, aside from a few very fixable situations. He owed nothing to anyone.
Now he had a boss. Whether he was driving Christopher home from school or watching TV with his grandmother or at a bar listening to a friend DJ, when the call came from Amin, he had to figure out how to be there. Whatever the conversion deadline was, he had to meet it or there would be consequences, typically financial but always carrying the latent menace of something more. He pulled all-nighters in the basement on Smith Street, sometimes two or three in a row, something he’d never had to do in college. This work was fundamentally more dangerous than anything else he’d ever done.