by Jeff Hobbs
I flew alone from LAX to JFK and arrived at eleven on the night before the funeral. Ty Cantey and a few other Yale classmates were out drinking relatively near my in-laws’ house in Brooklyn, so I went straight to the bar, my small suitcase clattering on the sidewalk behind me. This was in Clinton Hill, a kind of in-between neighborhood, and the side streets were dark and intimidating. But I reached the bar without incident and sidled up beside my old roommate. The girl whom Rob had set me up with following my college heartbreak, LaTasha, was also there. She’d majored in MB&B with Rob and was now a veterinarian in Philadelphia. Ty and I talked about our wives and children, the tribulations of last-minute travel arrangements, the logistics of all of us reaching Newark by train in the morning—anything, it seemed, except Rob himself. Our collective information regarding his death was still limited, which brought forward the sadder fact that, at the end of it all, none of us had actually known Rob as well as we thought we did, as well as we should have, as well as—with just a little more effort—we could have. But we were here. We’d spent the money and made the arrangements and undergone the hassle of gathering to commemorate his death. That, at least, meant something, as did our subdued toasts to Rob having been a “good dude.”
The next morning I showed up at the apartment where Ty and LaTasha were crashing on Eastern Parkway, across the street from the Brooklyn Museum. Ty, as he’d been on his wedding day, was late getting dressed. We boarded the subway a half hour later than we’d planned, got all turned around trying to find the Path station at the World Trade Center (wondering why, a decade after the towers had fallen in our senior year of college, they didn’t seem to be building anything yet), disembarked from the Path at the wrong stop, and were swindled by the Newark cabdrivers who charged a flat $20 to take us to the funeral less than a mile from the train station. The trip ended up being so long and error filled, our laughter over the general incompetence of us Yale graduates so constant, that at a certain point we almost forgot that we were heading to the funeral of someone we’d known and loved. Then we arrived and saw the people gathered outside. The ceremony was at St. Mary’s Church, which adjoined the St. Benedict’s campus. None of us had ever been to an open-casket funeral before. The line for the viewing was two blocks long and one of the most diverse collections of people I’d ever seen: Yale students and professors, people conversing in Portuguese and Croatian and Spanish, young and old residents of all the boroughs of New York City and all the townships surrounding Newark. More than four hundred people were there.
For us, the achingly slow-moving line along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard took on the aspect of a college reunion without alcohol. Some faces I recognized vaguely as Rob’s customers from a decade ago, men and women who’d constantly filed through our common room, wearing hoodies and piercings—uniform in their aversion to uniformity—to sit with Rob in giggly plumes of smoke, railing against university roboculture while feeding live mice to his python. Now they were lawyers and investment bankers, with faces creased and drawn by the skirmish of daily life. Others I’d known well, and as we inched perilously closer to the casket, our talk evidenced a shared fondness for Rob but also something else shared in our own receding dreams. There was Ty and his dermatology career, me and my struggles to publish a second novel, former history majors who were doing their best to remain in school forever. Nobody, it seemed, was making the money he’d thought he would make, inhabiting the home he’d thought he would inhabit, doing the thing he’d thought he would do in life. Nobody was fulfilling the dreams harbored on graduation day almost ten years earlier.
These uncomfortable observations closely preceded the limbo moments, maybe fifteen seconds’ worth, during which we finally filed inside and faced the embalmed body. Rob’s hair had been tightly braided by his cousin Diandra that morning. He was dressed in a black suit, with his hands folded at his waist. His head was tipped backward slightly. His skin was waxen, shrunken, scentless, insufficient, and so very still. I’d expected that Rob would look somewhat at ease—peaceful even. But if anything, he looked uncomfortable, like maybe he needed to crack his joints one last time to relieve some pressure inside him.
The day was muggy and hot, and the crowded church was stifling. Between the series of hymns and as the occasional cracked sob sent a stab of pain through the atmosphere, Friar Leahy gave a long and fiery sermon about the value of human life. I didn’t really listen to much of it, because I was trying to figure out what I would say when Ty and I went up to the lectern later. Victor had mentioned to me in an email that there would be something like an “open mike” at the end of the ceremony, and anyone could speak, but that comments should be kept under two minutes if possible. Ty went before me and promised to establish a scholarship to St. Benedict’s and to Yale in Rob’s name, to resonant applause. (There would ultimately be two separate efforts in this regard, and neither would gain any traction at all; donors weren’t prone to give money in the name of a drug dealer.) Then I was standing there, my gaze panning across those hundreds of faces, every one of whom Rob had known but only a very few of whom I did. The coffin was beneath the lectern and to the left. Rob’s face was obscured by a flower arrangement. I said something about the kung fu movies we used to watch in our dorm room, and something else about his grin and how we were all lucky to have known someone with a grin like that. After I stepped down, a funeral-crashing evangelist who had seen the obituary spoke extensively about the Lord’s judgment and how we all needed to go to church more often and pray more devoutly. Then Raquel climbed the three steps to the microphone and, through a curtain of tears, spoke of what a gentleman Rob was, what a good friend, what a role model to her son Felix (“He taught my son how to shake hands like a man instead of this Puerto Rican kissy-kiss-on-the-cheek thing we do when we greet people . . .”), and how he’d always instilled her with confidence: first when she’d been a student, then a young woman, and then, most important, a mother. She said, in reference to Jackie, “He knows a good mama when he sees one.” Then she concluded:
I don’t know where I heard it first but “It takes a long time to grow an old friend.” In that way, Rob was like a redwood tree looming large in my life. His life was cut short before it could reach the full heights of its glory. But as I look around this room, I take solace in the fact that so many others thrived and found refuge in his shade while he was with us. I miss you, Rob. I always will.
Only a small contingent made it to the burial following the service, maybe two dozen people or so. In a small lawn on the fringe of the sprawling Rosedale Cemetery, Rob was buried in his father’s plot, which still had no headstone. After a curiously labor-intensive process of straps and pulleys managed by two grunting, sweaty workers, his coffin was set literally on top of Skeet Douglas’s. From a heap of flowers at the foot of the plot, we each pulled a lily or a rose and dropped it on the bowed, dark wood. I noticed that there were a lot of pretty women our age weeping, none of whom seemed to know one another. I watched Jackie throughout the burial. She did not cry, though almost all the family members surrounding her did. She was tucked in the middle of them all, like a pillar covered in vines. She looked as she had in our dorm room that day in September of 1998, sullen and impassive and not yet accepting the sheer degree to which she would miss her son.
After that, a luncheon was held in St. Benedict’s bright and airy cafeteria, aluminum vats of chicken, rice, and greens. People were laughing and telling stories, some of which involved Rob, some of which didn’t. At one point Friar Leahy approached the table where the remaining Yale contingent sat. Ty and I stood and shook his hand. He told us about the school and its philosophy while showing us a plaque bearing Rob’s name as the 1998 Presidential Award winner. He seemed very happy to have a collection of Yale grads in his school, happy that we were there because a boy he had once taught had gone to Yale, had once stood on the cusp of achieving everything that word called to mind. I imagined Rob sitting over his own food in this very room
so many hundreds of mornings, as both a student and a teacher. I imagined the particular way he ate, hunched over, mouth close to the plate while his left forearm made a rampart around it, as if someone lurking nearby would try to snatch his meal away. Outside the windows stretched a pristine turf field where he had played lacrosse with Victor for one season. Beyond that, the Newark skyline cut an industrial picture against the overcast sky.
Like college graduation, there always seemed to be another event. The last of the day was at a bar in Bloomfield called A.S.H., one of Rob’s haunts. I took a ride from one of Rob’s East Orange friends who, while swerving sharply through the labyrinth of merging Newark streets, told me about the travails of his job selling cars, the lousy commissions. Once we reached the bar, he ordered me a “little beer,” one of Rob’s favorite drinks, which was disgusting, and we had our own toast, though I never even learned the guy’s name. Most of the people there, myself included, drank aggressively. Men I didn’t recognize were paying hundreds of dollars for bottles of vodka to bring to the tables, as if we were at a nightclub. I talked to Raquel, whom I barely knew, for a while about how weird it was that we were all adults. Oswaldo Gutierrez was there. He was the only one who still looked sober and grim, the expression that a day like this seemed to call for. I didn’t know how involved he had been in Rob’s life after college; I didn’t know how angry he was that day because Rob had never listened to him, because he had enabled Rob to not listen, because Rob had died owing him the $4,000 that had indirectly caused his death. Oswaldo knew better than to blame himself. Rob would have found that money one way or another, and that was one of the hardest things for many of us to accept: that no matter how loosely or intimately intertwined we had been with the life of Rob Peace, our ineffectuality extended far enough to encompass the living and dying of others. So fucking smart, but so fucking dumb. That was how Oswaldo had always characterized his friend, to his face as well as in his consciousness. The words were a refrain in his head that would play on and on and on.
THE BURGER BOYZ did not attend the funeral or any of the festivities that followed. Jackie requested their absence, and Nathan communicated this wish to them two days after Rob’s death. Flowy and Drew were mad at first, especially when they learned that the funeral was going to be at St. Benedict’s. The placement and their nonattendance made them look culpable, they felt, in a community that remained important to them. They planned to go anyway.
“No, you’re not doing that,” Tavarus told them. The day before, Tavarus had taken a sponge and a bucket downstairs. On his knees, using both hands to scrub deep into the textured flooring, he’d washed away Rob’s blood.
“How are we gonna lose our boy and not go to his funeral?” Flowy asked. “I’ve seen that boy most every day of my life since we were fourteen.”
“Because this is a mother who lost her son, and she wants answers that none of us have, and we are going to do whatever the hell she wants,” Tavarus replied. “That’s how.”
On the day of the funeral, they had their own small ceremony in the backyard, just a few yards from where Rob died. Police were still in and out, though less so as the days passed. They still hadn’t filed charges against Curtis, who’d been released after three nights in the cell, but charges were imminent. The house was nearly clean of the mess left in the wake of the police search; this had taken days of work. No one ventured to comment on their surreal capacity to remain in the house, to eat and sleep there, and, now, to share a mournful blunt and toast to Rob. They still could not fully process the vacancy following Rob’s death, the space that was not occupied by his broad shoulders, the silence that was not punctured by his voice. Christopher was riding his bike, the one Rob had given him years earlier, around the driveway. The bike was the perfect size for him now.
They couldn’t avoid talking about that night. Whether or not those men had shown up with the intent to kill Rob would always remain unclear. That no one remembered hearing the shots that killed him meant that they must have been discharged as Curtis was running upstairs from the large man firing on him. They figured that during Curtis’s failed intervention, whoever had a gun on Rob—a teenage neighbor who’d seen them leave said the second intruder had been a small, light-skinned guy with dreadlocks—must have turned around, and Rob must have made a move on him, perhaps thinking that his recent martial arts training gave him a better-than-average chance of gaining the upper hand. The Burger Boyz would never know if this had been the case, either. What Curtis did know was that if Rob hadn’t been shot, then the intruders wouldn’t have fled so quickly, and he would most likely be dead instead of—or in addition to—Rob. Tavarus, Darlene, and Christopher would have been vulnerable, too. Rob saved their lives. This was what they told themselves that night.
Curtis didn’t contribute much to the dialogue. He abstained from alcohol and drugs in the event that the police showed up, and he spent most of that long afternoon rooted in the moment four nights earlier when he’d held and cradled his friend’s lifeless body, a moment he would never leave.
The state medical examiner had pulled two .18 caliber bullets from Rob’s torso. The first shot had entered his abdomen and lacerated the liver. The second had struck him squarely in the chest, pierced a coronary artery, and lodged in the back of his rib cage. Blood had immediately begun filling his chest cavity, causing a very painful buildup of pressure. Rob was most likely conscious for ninety seconds or so, but his brain, which he had strived to dull so many thousands of times with marijuana, would have begun shutting down into a foggy state almost immediately from the drop in blood pressure. He had clearly suffered severely in the moments before he closed his eyes for the last time, but he suffered silently; Curtis had heard neither a cry nor a groan following the gunshots. Maybe, even then, he was thinking about his friends and contained his pain, as he’d always managed to do, so as not to draw them down to the basement and into harm’s way.
* * *
Killed in apparent drug-related shooting,Yale alumnus remembered for leadership
Wherever he went, Robert Peace was a star.
His intellect and athletic skill carried him from the modest apartment he shared with his mother in Orange, to the halls of Newark’s venerable St. Benedict’s Academy, where he won the school’s highest honor, and then to Yale University, where he graduated with a degree in molecular biochemistry.
Even when he was shot to death in a Newark house Wednesday, police say, he was not your garden variety drug dealer.
The 30-year-old Yale scientist was using his knowledge of biochemistry to bring in $1,000 a day selling marijuana grown in the basement of the Smith Street home where he was killed, said law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case. . . .
Flowy’s cell phone rang all morning the day the article was published in the Newark Star-Ledger; almost everyone he knew was telling him not to read it. They weren’t worried so much about the article itself, the remainder of which briefly described police speculation regarding Rob’s alleged drug distribution network, followed by a longer recap of all his past achievements at St. Benedict’s and Yale. They were more concerned about Flowy seeing the online public comments that followed, which over the day of the article’s release had degenerated into a kind of class warfare.
From opieisback: How you go from Yale to this, I don’t know.
From drphil1: One word—MONEY. Not everyone who graduates from Yale becomes a success. Peace saw that he could make hundreds of thousands of dollars manufacturing rather than working in a lab for peanuts. Of course he had to establish a distribution system that brought in more people including those that wanted a big piece of the action. His demise means his manufacturing operation is defunct and the distribution network he supported is disrupted.
From LADYFROMNJ30: This man was a loyal friend to many! This article was written by two idiots
that have no clue as to what actually took place in this house . . . I have been to this home many times and know for a fact there was no ‘lab’ in the basement . . . come on now are you serious? He didn’t even live at this house!!!! At the end of the day, I am not here to go back and forth in an argument with anyone here. It’s just sad that he lost his life, his family and friends have lost someone and this man is not even here to defend himself. The police monopolize on any opportunity to exploit the black man in Newark, and ANYONE with real common sense would know this and not post these ignorant comments about ‘education’ being thrown away . . .
From Yo: The police monopolize on any opportunity to exploit the black man in Newark . . . Huh? Don’t think because he was black that he was destined to be a criminal.
From FactsDon’tMatter: To the rest of the people here that THINK they know everything about Robert. You don’t. You don’t know that he was raised by a single mother that worked in a kitchen; you don’t know the hardships he had to overcome, like having a father in prison. You don’t know that he tried his hardest to get his dad out of that prison when he was terminally ill with cancer only to be turned down and then having to watch his father waste away and die behind bars. You don’t know the many young men he inspired by being there for them and with them. You don’t know the many young men he taught to swim. You don’t know how he made chemistry assessable to those same kids. . . . You only know anecdotal clichés about drugs and fast money and consequences . . . I didn’t know Robert well, but I knew of him as my son’s Water Polo coach, a guy who pushed and cared for those kids that he coached. I know that I am saddened that a great light has been extinguished. I’m sad because he died alone. I’m sad because he’ll no longer be there to inspire another young gifted Black man to aspire to Yale and beyond. The rest of you can be happy, but those of us that knew Robert in any way at all are devastated. RIP ROB . . . Another Grey Bee gone too soon. WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME.