The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (12 page)

That summer, Rob went to the public pool at Columbian Park four days a week to train with Flowy and Tavarus. They would swim a hundred laps and throw the ball around, shooting on a homemade net kept afloat with empty milk jugs. Afterward, they would go back to Curtis's house, eat, play video games, and do schoolwork since St. Benedict's held a Summer Phase to keep the students engaged.

Tavarus was tapped to go on a retreat to Maine, at the estate of Charles Cawley. Mr. Cawley, Class of '55, was the CEO of MBNA bank and the largest benefactor of the school. Of the $5 million Friar Leahy raised to keep St. Benedict's running each year, Mr. Cawley gave roughly half, sometimes more if needed. Every summer, the banker opened his vast property to twelve students: four top students, four average students, and four academically poor students. All were deemed by school counselors as coming from “troubled” circumstances (which was why Rob,
who exhibited no outward signs of hardship at home, was not selected). The idea was to reward good work while providing incentive for those falling off. Tavarus was among the worst of the latter selection, and between the catered sit-down lobster dinners and fishing trips and lectures on economics given by credit card titans, he managed to start a fistfight. That night, still heated and snarling under his breath, he was ordered to call home and explain what he'd done. He called Rob instead.

“What happened?” Rob asked, sounding very much like the stern but patient father Tavarus had lost.

Tavarus explained: the kid had made a comment about his shoes, they'd started having words, one thing led to another, Tavarus wasn't about to let himself be punked, etc.

“Wait, wait, wait, hold up,” Rob said. “You're getting served steak and lobster, getting to sleep in your own bedroom with your own bathroom and a
maid
—and you're starting shit over some words about shoes?” Rob made a
psha
sound. “Don't be such a bitch, T.”

When he phrased it that way, Tavarus felt pretty much like a bitch.

“Just chill,” Rob told him. “Don't let the stupid shit get to you. Think about the big picture.”

The retreat, a comprehensive immersion in the lifestyle of the haves, was transformative for Tavarus. When he returned, with Rob's guidance and encouragement, he signed up for extra summer tutoring at the school and in the evenings let Rob coach him on how to study—­specifically how to take quality notes in class and then focus on the meat of each subject without going cross-eyed from the details. When Curtis's father spoke of college, Tavarus had never allowed himself to feel included in that particular brand of long-term thinking. And as a 0.7 freshman-­year GPA was a deep, deep hole to be tasked with digging himself out of, he still didn't. But in some long-dormant part of his consciousness, now stirred by his friend Rob, he saw it: a campus far from here with grassy quads and matching eaved buildings, with ­Tavarus himself walking through it carrying an armload of books. This image was grainy, but the resolution became sharper and more detailed with each hour
spent in awe of Rob. During their first year, Tavarus had figured his friend to be naturally gifted, as if all he had to do to maintain that 4.0 GPA was open his eyes each morning. Over the course of that summer, he learned how doggedly Rob worked, the sheer volume of pages he read, the ­meticulousness with which he notated those pages. In Rob's small room on the second floor of the Chapman Street house, a three-shelf bookcase was packed with black-and-white composition books, the front and back of each page filled with single-spaced notes from various classes. Tavarus thought,
Damn, this is how you go places.

A
BIG DRAW
of the water polo team was that there were only three squads, including St. Benedict's, in all of New Jersey. For competition, the team had to travel most weekends to tournaments in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, where the school would rent four doubles at a Motel 6 or Super 8 and the players would pack in seven and eight to a room.

During an early-season trip in the fall of sophomore year—Rob's first on the team—one player had managed to bring along a six-pack of Bacardi Breezers. To enthusiastic hollers, he handed them out, but Rob refused his. He panned around the room of young black men sitting on cheap hotel mattresses, sipping on their pink carbonated lady drinks.

“You look like a bunch of pussies,” he cracked.

Flowy responded, “You're so hard, you bring the party supplies next trip.”

The following weekend, Rob opened his duffel bag and pulled out a dime bag of weed as well as a fifth of E&J Brandy. He poured the liquor into small plastic cups from the lobby. Tavarus, who also had more than a bit of experience with drinking and drugs, was the only excited one. All the other boys sniffed the stuff, made faces, looked around to confirm that they were not alone in their apprehension. But they were trapped in this room now, with pride at stake as Rob Peace watched them expectantly. He was already rolling a small blunt, sliding his tongue across the cigarette paper and tweedling the package back and forth between his thumbs and index fingers.

“This gonna make me sick for the game tomorrow?” Drew asked.

“Game's not till the afternoon,” Rob replied. “And you're big as hell. You'd have to drink this whole fifth to get sick.”

“Smells nasty,” someone else said.

“That's why you down it fast.” Rob took a shot, exhaled a sated breath, poured another.

Dutifully, without toasts or fanfare, the boys downed their shots. The brown, lukewarm spirit tasted toxic and burnt, like a zipper of fire being ripped down their throats. And yet even this first shot, before Rob finished rolling the joint and sharing hits, seemed to soften the world around them while at the same time hardening their own interiors. Once the weed entered into the proceedings, time itself began to thin out and grow gentler. They chanted rap lyrics and talked sports and mostly just laughed so hard that they were sure Coach Ridley would knock down the door and kick them out of school—which, because they were stoned, made them laugh harder. The next day, though Rob was not yet a strong enough swimmer to make the starting rotation, they won their JV game.

After that trip it was clear that Curtis may have been a leader of men, but Rob was the Man, a guy who could
hook you up.
And indeed, not long after that a few classmates approached him quietly in the hallway with a question (this as they walked single file, shoulders pressed to the wall, singing): Can we buy some weed off you?

“Hell no,” Rob said, and instead told them to talk to Tavarus, who was able to get real quantities of marijuana through his older brother. Tavarus was living in a one-story, two-bedroom home on Halsted Street with his grandmother, aunt, and numerous cousins. Rob knew how badly he needed the money, which was why he was surprised a few days later, when Tavarus slipped him a twenty-dollar bill in passing.

“Kickback,” Tavarus said quietly. “Thanks.”

Rob had the money changed at a store on the way home and left half for his mother, just like he always had. Twenty dollars for a referral was not bad at all.

C
URTIS PULLED
R
ob
and the rest of the team out of the pool during warm-ups. “There's a fight. Shit is
real.
”

With towels around their waists, they ran to the skyway connecting the school to the faculty parking garage across the street, from which they could see all the way down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. What they saw wasn't a fight so much as a riot, with a few dozen students and some teachers from St. Benedict's lined up across from a phalanx of students from the nearby public school, Central High. The Central kids would often venture down toward St. Benedict's at the end of the school day to taunt what they saw as overprivileged prep schoolers, call them faggots and pussies and bitches. This had been a problem for years, and Friar Leahy addressed it from time to time during morning convocation. He told his boys to keep their heads down and maintain their perspective, and never to forget that words were just words. But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth. And just as they had with Tavarus at the Maine estate, words electrified that day and became clenched fists cracking against chins, brains colliding against crania. Teachers from St. Benedict's—the young ones who'd gone to school here not long before and were still in tune with these tensions—came outside to break it up, only to become involved themselves. Rob's crew watched the melee from one story up and fifty yards away, aching to take part—Rob more than the rest, watching his classmates be inexorably overcome by the greater numbers from Central. He headed for the stairs, his musculature tensing in full. Curtis grabbed him by both shoulders from behind.

“You don't even have shoes on.”

Rob looked down at his gym shirt, the towel around his waist, his bare feet on the cold concrete. “Fuck,” he said.

Flowy murmured, “I'll go down there. I know those boys. I'll talk.”

They went inside and got dressed. Rob and Flowy intended to find familiar faces in the Central High group, and pacify. But by that time
the police had already arrived, and seven people were in handcuffs. Still, Flowy wandered up to the front steps of Central at the end of the day, founds some guys he knew, tried to sort out what exactly had happened, and ensure that everyone was cool.

The next morning, Friar Leahy assembled the entire school in the gymnasium and lit into students and faculty alike for two hours. He gave sermons every Sunday in the church that adjoined the school, and the one he gave that day was full of fire and brimstone, rendering a vivid version of the future begotten by what had happened: prison, poverty, and early death—a future that many of the boys saw around them every day. The friar's voice, hoarse to begin with, faded to an angry, condemning rasp.

Afterward, a rumor began spreading that Friar Leahy was going to retire in the wake of this, that he couldn't go on leading people who wouldn't follow him.

Rob, Curtis, Flowy, and Tavarus set a meeting in his office, and they begged him to stay. They promised to corral the student body and bring guys back in line. With Rob speaking for the group, he told Friar Leahy that if he were to leave, they would leave, too. Because they still had two years and change, and they wouldn't go to a school where Friar Leahy wasn't the headmaster.

Friar Leahy had in fact never harbored any thought of leaving the school he'd built, but he indulged the boys their pleas because they were so sincere. What struck him most about the meeting was that he'd never heard Rob Peace speak so much at one time, and he saw in the speech a kind of quiet leadership that came along rarely. Later that year, he asked Rob to lead the freshmen on the Appalachian Trail in May, a task normally given to juniors.

During the hike, a rainstorm moved in quickly, in the middle of the night, shrouding them in total blackness and flooding the campsite with runoff beneath the sharp strikes of lightning and resounding thunder. While everyone scrambled for shelter from the lashing winds, communication along the line of campsites was lost, and Rob's group
of twenty-four freshmen became isolated from the rest. Their cheap tents collapsed. The freshmen, though just a year younger than he, were mortally scared. More than a handful of them had witnessed gunfights in their neighborhoods, seen dead bodies sprawled on concrete. But this, the raging of nature, was completely new and terrifying. Rob had everyone hold hands—“Just do it,” he growled when one student gave it a homosexual slant—and he led them down off the exposed mountainside like children. They left everything except rain gear so that they could move fast. They ended up in a small town off the trail, two dozen black kids huddled in the front yard of a rural house at three in the morning while Rob knocked on the door and, very respectfully and politely, asked if he might use the phone inside. After Rob called a faculty coordinator back in Newark to let him know they were okay, the homeowner asked if the boys wanted to stay in his garage until the storm let up. Rob declined; now that no one was going to be struck by lightning or washed down a mountainside, he wanted his group to get through this on their own.

The next fall, a new addition came to the Class of '98 in the tall, pale, goofy form of Hrvoje Dundovic. He'd come alone from Pula, Croatia, fleeing the economic malaise that had gripped the country since the Balkan conflict of 1992. He was living with a host family in East Orange, an arrangement made through the St. Benedict's alumni network. Having come from a suburban seaside enclave in a nearly all-white country, he could not have ended up in a more alien environment. During nights and weekends, he rarely went outside. At school, the cultural divisions were amplified by the fact that this was a particularly tight-knit class that had been together for two years already. Three months into the school year, he had yet to hear anyone, including teachers, pronounce his name correctly (HIT-of-way). He did, however, join the water polo team. He'd grown up playing water polo, which was one of the reasons he'd landed at St. Benedict's. His strategy to fend off homesickness was to listen to his Walkman all the time and lose himself in the songs he'd grown up listening to in his bedroom back home.

“What you got in there?” Rob, now one of the leaders of the varsity team, asked out of the blue. He nodded toward the music player.

“The Misfits,” Hrvoje answered in his thick glottal accent.

Rob motioned with his hands, and Hrvoje slipped off the headphones and passed them over. Rob's eyes went wide with distaste upon hearing the screechy wail of Glenn Danzig, the metallic confusion that was the guitar and drums. “What the hell kind of music is this?”

“Prog rock,” Hrvoje answered. “Or some call it punk.”