The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (13 page)

“Damn, that is awful.” Rob walked away shaking his head and laughing.

Hrvoje assumed this exchange would be the end of their acquaintance, but the next day Rob came back to hear more, Black Flag in the Walkman this time. Rob knew what prog rock was now; he'd looked it up in his Encyclopaedia Britannica the night before. He had memorized the dates, the important figures in the movement, the intellectual thinking behind the sound. From then on, the two of them sat together on bus rides, Rob willing himself to develop an appreciation, if not a taste, for punk rock while he coached Hrvoje through the lyrics of his own favorites: DMX, Nas, Tupac. An image that would be remembered always by the team was Hrvoje, standing in front of the bus aisle while Rob goaded him on, both hands folded into hang-ten signs and jabbing at the air, singing Tupac's “Hail Mary” in his Croat accent.

Rob, Tavarus, Drew, Flowy, and Curtis called themselves the Burger Boyz, because between class and practice they could typically be found at the Burger King around the corner. Rob never bought food for himself. Tavarus would spring for him on occasion, a culinary version of the kickbacks he still gave to Rob for shepherding marijuana business his way. Most of the time, Rob was content to suck on ketchup packets from the condiment bins, sometimes a dozen in one sitting. He told his friends that he did it for the salt, and he would segue into a chemistry-­based explanation of the NaCl exchange necessary, on the cellular level, to drive the body through the workouts to which Coach Ridley subjected them. But his friends knew he was concerned about money. They'd all been
to his house, registered the austerity of it, the way the lights or the heat would be shut off from time to time. By now, they called Jackie “Ma.” Sometimes she would bring home surplus food from work, which was a long fall quality-wise from the homemade spaghetti and casseroles Mrs. Gamble made for them, but the boys were always gracious. The only other food option at Rob's house were the rows of Oodles of Noodles in the cupboard, bought from the Price Cutter on Springfield Avenue.

They all were poor, but Rob seemed to hold his poverty closer than the rest of them, to feed off it like he fed off the ketchup packets: a nutritionless condiment that powered him through miles and miles of water. He didn't joke about being poor the way most did; he didn't outwardly resent it, either. Rather, he carried it with him under vigilant guard: the one pair of school shoes he shined obsessively, the earnings figures still recorded in the composition book beside his bed, the encyclopedias he kept dusted, the refusal to spend money on anything personal, not even weed, which he'd been procuring through Carl, whom Rob called his uncle, since Carl had been the most constant male presence on Chapman Street since his father's imprisonment. His friends figured that he contained whatever anxiety he felt because he alone knew that he would one day overcome it, and not even too long from now.

T
HE WATER POLO TEAM
was strong their junior year, in the fall of 1996. Rob, now the lead butterflyer on the swim team, played in the “hole,” the basketball equivalent of a power forward. At five eleven with a barrel chest and short but muscular arms—as well as the ability to absorb and dole out punishment—he was naturally suited to the role. The offense ran through him as he hovered five yards in front of the opponent's goal, shrugging off defenders who would alternately lock their forearms under his armpits to pull him underwater, dig their nails (unclipped specifically for this purpose) into the flesh of his neck, angle their kneecaps to take shots at his testicles underwater, where the refs couldn't see. Rob, often deploying the covert elbows that his father once schooled
him on, was adept at shrugging these defenders off so that he could pull in a pass, take a shot himself, or kick the ball out to Flowy or Hrvoje on the wings. Tavarus, small but quick enough to cover the full width of the pool, played defense along with Drew in the goal. A big part of their game was the intimidation inherent in a team of muscular, razor-mouthed, dark-skinned (all except for Hrvoje, who looked like a pale, skeletal specter among them) inner-city boys walking into the pools of the privileged majority, there to play rough and win games dirty if need be—and talk more than their share of smack while they did it. If parents in the stands weren't complaining to the refs about their language, then the Gray Bees figured they weren't talking enough. The team carried with it an unbridled quality, some primal mixture of arrogance and competitiveness and zeal.

They won their first tournament at Lawrenceville, near Princeton, and came in second at their next, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Ultimately, they would come two wins shy of winning the Mid-­Atlantic championships, and Flowy would be selected to the All-Regional First Team. A referee pulled him aside one weekend and told him that if he was interested, he could pull strings to put Flowy on track for a scholarship to UMass. On the nights in motels between the games, the boys—with Hrvoje now a part of their group—would drink and smoke, listen to music, and play spades deep into the night before playing their hearts out the following day. During the week, they would practice until after six, watch game film at Coach Ridley's house until eight, go to Curtis's house and study until ten, at which point Mrs. Gamble would drop each of them back at his home. When she'd first begun doing this, Flowy had asked her to let him off on South Orange Avenue, a well-trafficked thoroughfare, rather than enter the narrower, darker side streets of his neighborhood on 18th Avenue. She'd told him not to be silly; she'd lived in East Orange for over three decades and knew how to check her mirrors.

At school, they began working with college guidance counselors—even Tavarus, who in two years had raised his 0.7 GPA to 2.1. Flowy
was extremely aware of the financial realities that lay between him and something like college—which, unlike St. Benedict's, could not be paid for with a few hundred dollars' worth of Social Security each month—but that referee's voice made a resonant echo in his head:
scholarship, scholarship, scholarship.
Curtis, the only one whose parents had gone to college, was already listing party schools, particularly in Atlanta; Morehouse appealed to him. And Rob was thinking about Seton Hall, eight blocks from his home and his mother. His counselor told him that he should apply wherever he wanted to apply—that with Rob's grades and his leadership accolades (not to mention a combined SAT score of 1510 out of 1600, placing him in the ninety-ninth percentile nationally), it couldn't hurt to visit a few of the top-tier schools, if only to see what they looked like. The school organized and paid for these visits, which would begin the following summer before senior year. Rob went ahead and signed up for the Ivy League tour; he didn't take the prospect seriously, but he would travel anywhere given the free opportunity.

Junior year, as the Burger Boyz would remember it, ended with a party. Rob walked the mile to Curtis's house, where Tavarus and Flowy met up with them. They took a few hits of weed together and then all walked west as the sky darkened, their crew looking the same as any other group of young men trolling around East Orange that night. They said hey to anyone they passed, people they knew and people they didn't. They smoked continuously and drank from brown-bagged bottles of Cisco wine, past the Seton Hall campus and into South Orange, where the wide streets curved beneath blooming cherry blossom trees and the green lawns were lit by yellow lights embedded in the mulched gardens. They ended up at Columbia High, the public school servicing this wealthy area. Rob's friend from Mt. Carmel, Jason Delpeche, went to school here and had invited them to a dance. Drew met them in the gymnasium. There were supposed to be girls there. The Burger Boyz tended to do well with girls.

Except tonight's party sucked: a few dozen kids pressed against the wall of a cavernous gym, with parent chaperones eyeing those who ventured to dance too closely. They couldn't believe that they'd walked three miles to be there and would have to walk three miles home. Curtis made a call from the lobby pay phone and learned of a party down the street, at some kind of dance studio, so the five of them took off. They didn't realize they were being followed until a hundred yards later. Back in East Orange, trailing footsteps would cause the backs of their necks to tingle in apprehension, their eyes to begin scanning for an alley down which to escape. But behind them now, almost all the Columbia High students were walking as if in formation, just as the freshmen had done on the Appalachian Trail, confident that Rob, Curtis, Tavarus, Flowy, and Drew would lead them somewhere they all wanted to be.

They landed at the next party and immediately became its center, cluster-dancing in slow motion under strobe lights, surrounded by girls, sneaking outside for hits of marijuana, feeling the excited beating of their own hearts as the culmination of the last three years together, three years that had formed them somehow, without any of them being aware. In the fall of 1994, they'd been boys, followers of other boys. Now, in the spring of 1997, they were young men, leaders who had earned the right to strut the way they did. And three, ten, twenty years from now? On that night, they were confident, even arrogant, that they would rule the city of Newark.

Chapter 5

C
OACH
R
IDLEY STOOD
across from the seething, wild-eyed boy as their last volley of charged words ricocheted off the tiles of the pool. He couldn't believe this was happening, that he'd allowed what had been intended to be a quiet, sensible conversation to reach this pitch—and at seven in the morning no less.

St. Benedict's opened its pool to the neighboring public in the mornings, mostly city employees swimming a few laps before work. Rob had been lifeguarding for a small wage his junior and senior years, which meant getting to school no later than five thirty to open up the pool.

Coach Ridley had figured that this early, quiet hour would be as good a time as any to broach a topic that had been bothering him for many weeks now, and so he'd waited for all the swimmers to finish, leaving Rob alone to close down the pool. As the boy went about his succession of tasks—spooling in the lane ropes, stowing away the kickboards—Coach Ridley approached and asked Rob outright why he smoked so much marijuana, why he would jeopardize his lungs, his mind, his future that way. His intention was to have a reasonable conversation in the manner that St. Benedict's teachers were trained to confront their students' out-of-school lives: nothing accusatory, nothing tense, nothing to drive a boy farther away. But Coach Ridley—though he'd spent so many hundreds of hours in this very same chamber with Rob, though he'd taught the kid to swim, though he'd opened his own home so the Burger Boyz could study film—had no idea of the vast reservoir of anger within Rob Peace. And somehow his very earnest questions about Rob's
drug use had fully loosed this anger.

Now Coach Ridley was standing there, his own temples pumping with blood, hearing Rob scream, “I haven't had a father since I was seven years old! What makes you think I need one now?”

This was the first time Coach Ridley had ever heard the kid mention his father. He replied, “I'm not trying to be your father, Rob. I just care about you.”

But Rob was already stalking out of the pool, his bare feet slapping the wet tiles. During his five years of teaching, Coach Ridley had never lost control of an interaction so completely. Rob didn't show up at water polo practice for the rest of the week.

At St. Benedict's, academics represented only a fraction of the faculty's responsibilities. Test scores were in many ways secondary to the task of instilling confidence in kids not primed to believe in themselves and confronting rampant emotional issues resulting from the loss of a parent, usually a father. The school's emphasis on sports went a long way, particularly rarefied sports like water polo, fencing, and lacrosse. The expansive counseling system was a fundamental part of the curriculum, as well as the teacher rotation—without overtime pay—that kept the school's doors open on weekends to students seeking a quiet place to work away from harried homes. But there remained limits to what infrastructure could accomplish, because the biggest mistake a counselor could make in addressing emotional problems was to call attention to those problems outright. In troubled cases, the key was to locate a tangential entry point, something like a back door through which counseling could be administered without the boy feeling as though he needed extra help.

The first telltale sign of difficulty at home tended to be academic: a disengagement with the classroom and subsequent falling grades. While heartbreaking to watch, this process presented a tangible opportunity to find that back door—as had been the case with Tavarus freshman year, when the Maine retreat had successfully aligned his touchy consciousness with the potential he'd forgotten he had.

But there were the rare students bright enough to maintain high
grades no matter what they were struggling with internally. As Coach Ridley learned that early winter morning of 1998, Rob Peace was one of those students. All the anger Rob felt—at his father's imprisonment, his mother's weariness, his own poverty that tasted like ketchup packets—only seemed to fuel his merits as a scholar and leader, and hide itself behind those ever-rising attributes.

The following Friday night, while Coach Ridley was packing for a water polo tournament—and trying to figure out who could play the hole position in Rob's place—Rob called him at home. He asked when the bus was leaving tomorrow. Coach Ridley, aware that Rob knew very well what time the bus left, told him to be at school by eight in the morning.

“Cool,” Rob said. “Cool.” Silence followed, but neither hung up.

“How are you feeling about the games tomorrow?” Coach asked.

“Strong. I think we can run the table.”

They talked for an hour, about game strategy against the talented ­Exeter Academy team, about the New York Giants, about random school gossip and events. They talked about everything except what they'd talked about earlier in the week.

Rob was on fire at the tournament, scoring multiple goals in each of their four games. They lost to Exeter in the semifinals but won their consolation game to take third place overall. And Coach Ridley never confronted Rob again about marijuana. He figured that here was a fundamentally good kid of spectacular mental faculty, and that if he could do as well as he did while relying on a little cannabis to metabolize his anger, then maybe it was best not to meddle, not now.

I
N THE SECOND
week of their senior year, Rob was elected group leader, the president of all the eighteen color groups, each of which had its own president and vice president. He was in charge of the convocation each morning, resolving conflicts among the underclassmen, and, above all, disciplinary measures. One of his first actions was to make boots illegal
in school. Because of the uniforms, many students utilized footwear as fashion statements. Sneakers weren't allowed, and so kids wore big construction boots with the laces untied—just like Rob had worn at Mt. Carmel. Rob decided that these boots were a distraction in the hallways and in class, with the heavy thumps they made and the fights they sometimes caused. He took plenty of flack for this policy decision, but he didn't care. The rule went into effect.

When he wasn't at school, he was with Curtis, whose father had died during the summer between junior and senior years: an assault of cancer similar to that which had taken Tavarus's father four years earlier. Alone or all together, the Burger Boyz reneged on their silent agreement to steer their talk clear of the hard stuff, and they wondered what beef God had with the fathers and sons of East Orange. Curtis's father, though sometimes gruff, had provided a beacon for the group, as well as a motivator, a constant stream of eyes-on-the-prize mentality. While thugs, junkies, and vagrants trolled up and down Smith Street at night, Mr. Gamble had always been home by six, available for help with homework or a verbal ass-kicking for any of the five boys who merited one. And now he—just like Tavarus's father, just like Flowy's, just like Drew's, just like Rob's—was gone.

Losing a father was more than a singular devastating event. It marked the beginning of a struggle, a lifetime struggle made harder by the conscious awareness that it would always be so, that no achievement would ever nullify the reality of such an absence. The single thing that did help—to cope with if not to overcome—was friendship, to which these boys clung fiercely.

Through all the various periods of tragedy during their four years together, Rob had yet to reveal anything about his own father. He visited Skeet once a month—more often if his sports schedule permitted—in secret. These visits encompassed more than a father and son divided by Plexiglas, striving to remain in tune with one another's day-to-day. Rob had in fact been spending a vast amount of time helping his father legally prepare for his long-awaited first appeal, which Skeet had been
engineering for five years now.

During the summer between sophomore and junior years, Rob and Tavarus had both interned at a real estate firm run by a St. Benedict's alumnus, mostly doing title research. They'd spent much of each day in the Office of Public Records downtown, cross-referencing tax maps with parcel numbers and property values and transfer deeds, making sure that there were no title irregularities capable of deep-sixing an acquisition (Newark real estate was characterized by its irregularities). The Essex County Law Library was just across Springfield Avenue from the Office of Public Records, and during lunch breaks Rob began spending time there, studying capital murder cases and all the various elements of his father's trial that, increasingly as he grew older, plagued him. Once his junior year of school began, he would finish his homework and then—while his classmates watched TV or talked on the phone or slept—spend a late-night hour with these dense tomes of legal jargon, filling up notebooks with any shred of precedent that might help. As a teenager beginning in 1996, Rob had taken it upon himself to do what the public defenders had failed to do in the fall of 1990: prove that Skeet was innocent. Through his junior year, the following summer, and the first semester of his senior year, in the midst of the trail hikes and early-morning lifeguarding and his group leader responsibilities and high school romances and his first college applications, Rob worked on behalf of his father.

And on December 2, 1997, midway through Rob's senior year of high school, he, Skeet, and a pro bono lawyer named Carl Herman filed a petition for postconviction relief. They argued that Skeet's constitutional right to a speedy trial, granted by the Sixth Amendment, had been violated. At the center of this strategy was Irving Gaskins, the man in whose home Skeet had been arrested and who had passed away a year before the trial. Gaskins had been interviewed at the time of the arrest, stating firmly that Skeet had possessed no weapon. But he hadn't been asked to give a formal deposition to Skeet's lawyers before his death, and so this testimony never came forth in the trial. Carl Herman blamed the public defenders for insufficient representation in this regard, as well as
for “severely prejudicing” Skeet's case due to the nearly yearlong period during which the office denied him representation following his initial arrest. Once Skeet had been granted representation, his lawyers had also opted not to file a “speedy trial motion,” which Herman argued further protracted the proceedings.

One of Skeet's public defenders from his trial testified during the postconviction relief hearing that December. Ironically, he did so on behalf of the State, making the case that he had represented Skeet more than adequately, that three years between arrest and trial was not uncommon for a capital crime and had been necessary in order to plan his strategy, and that Gaskins's statement, even if it had been recorded, would not have affected the outcome of the trial given that Gaskins would have spoken of what he had not seen (the murder weapon) rather than what he had. The lawyer argued that the long pretrial process had in fact spared Skeet's life, as it had granted the defense time necessary to “prepare a list of mitigating factors” and escape the death penalty.

But on that day, the presiding judge sided with Skeet and said, “Based upon the defendant's claim of a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to speedy trial, and as a consequence thereof, the indictment which charged him with murder and other offenses has been dismissed.” The judge stayed the decision for fifty days to permit the State to appeal, meaning that Rob's father was not yet an entirely free man. Nevertheless, ten years and four months after the murders of the Moore sisters, Skeet came home.

R
OB AND
C
ARL STOOD
on either side of Skeet as they walked past the final guard station and into the main parking lot beneath an overcast Trenton sky. The redbrick wall behind and above them cast its long shadow over the rows of vehicles. They burrowed into their coats, walked quietly to Carl's car, and headed for the turnpike. Rob had spent many nights preparing to fill his father in on how Newark and the world had changed in the last decade: the Gulf War, Bill Clinton, the razing
of four project towers by Mayor James, the breakouts of rap artists like Nas and Outkast and Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. (he'd made a mix tape for the drive), the murders of the latter two. He knew his father thrived on asking questions, and he was ready to provide everything Skeet wanted to know, share all the information that time constraints had precluded during their half-hour visits over the years.

But Skeet's thirst for human data was limited to only one human: his son. School, sports, his friends, his girlfriends—he drilled Rob with rapid-fire questions, and Rob was startled. As a kid who had geared much of his life around the concerns of others, he was neither accustomed to nor comfortable fielding inquiries about himself. Rob grew increasingly quiet in the backseat as Carl bucked along South Orange Avenue. Skeet had lived his whole preprison life within a mile of this road, but he hadn't laid eyes on it in a decade. He didn't lay eyes on it now, craning his body instead to face his son, their too-similar faces just inches apart, breathing the same air, no more barriers between them.