The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (22 page)

One night sophomore year, they returned to the room swearing and hyped up with rage. Rob had a large black welt on his forehead.

I asked what happened. “Some fool just hit me in the street, turned tail, and ran away,” Rob growled.

“Who?”

“Don't know. Wasn't a Yalie.”

“Why'd he do it?” I asked, thinking of my own comical fistfight, knowing that I was incapable of producing a bruise like that on a man while visualizing the kind of person who could.

“Thought I was someone else.”

I believed this story of mistaken identity, and I participated in their collective anger.

“We should find the guy,” I said, thinking that was the thing you said in this situation—but definitely not thinking that the three of them would put their coats back on and head for Victor's car to troll the streets of New Haven, looking for retribution. Unlike Ty—unlike most anyone I'd ever known—Rob wasn't in the business of chest-thumping. Words, for him, meant deeds. Otherwise, he would just be fronting.

“You coming?” he asked. The writer in me wanted to go, as here was an opportunity to cross boundaries somehow, as well as prove to my friend that I was “real.” But the sheltered college student was terrified of the prospect manifesting in their narrow, glaring eyes. Very rarely, real violence had infiltrated the campus. There'd been a gang-related shoot-out at the intersection of York and Chapel Streets the year before. Every few months a student walking alone at night on the edge of campus was mugged or even beaten. There'd been a heavily publicized stabbing
death a few months earlier, along with bulletins that warned us to walk in groups after dark, know where the blue-lit emergency phones were, stay on campus at all times.

I did go with them, pride ultimately trumping good sense. In Victor's old Lincoln, we drove widening concentric circles around campus. That there was no way we'd ever find this guy became quickly apparent (a relief to me), and yet hours passed quietly, elongated, each of us peering out at the deserted streets and darkened, crooked clapboard houses in which most of the population of New Haven, aside from the five thousand Yale undergrads, lived. Rob would slow the car when we passed small groups of men on the sidewalk, studying each of their faces until one of them invariably turned and spread his arms and said, “The fuck you want?” At around three thirty, long after what we were doing had become more of a ritual than an actual undertaking, I murmured, “Hey, Rob, doesn't seem like we're gonna find this asshole. Maybe we should just head back to . . . campus?” He gingerly fingered the welt on his head and replied, “Yeah, getting low on gas anyway. Motherfucker.”

On that night and on all the less eventful others, I was envious of the degree to which these three men knew each other, their shared history and easy way of spending a weekend together, as if no time at all had separated these visits—and the understated yet automatic way they had one another's backs. I had never had a male friendship like that; I couldn't even conceive of how to build one. Though I didn't understand this at the time, the fact was that it hadn't been built. Like the organic compounds Rob worked with in the lab, their friendship had evolved over time, experience, and an inexorable atomic pull. They called each other “brother,” and in the context from which they came, a brother was someone who would die for you—not as a verbal phrasing meant to suggest a deep kinship but in actual fact should the need arise.

Tavarus and Flowy were more guarded when they came, just once, during Af-Am Week of junior year. Their offishness may have had to do with their circumstances at the time: Tavarus had just dropped out of college and was back in Newark, living with his brother in a run-down
apartment above and beneath Section 8 recipients and neighboring a significant drug den. He was trying to get his foot in the real estate business, building off that high school job doing title research; his poor grades and dropout status from two years of college did not aid him. Flowy had torn two ligaments in his knee when he'd slipped lifeguarding, and he hadn't worked in a month. They were both in one of life's ebbs, unsure about anything, wondering how they'd been riding such promising trajectories at St. Benedict's just two and a half years before. They must have experienced some reserve in seeing Rob with his towers of books, his spacious, paid-for apartment, his thriving business, his white roommate with the crew cut and Yale Track & Field T-shirts, his stable of female friends who happily came by to spend three hours rebraiding his cornrows just for the pleasure of his company. With melancholy faces, they spent the afternoon in our living room, arms folded and shoulders hunched as if they'd been called into the master of discipline's office at St. Benedict's. They were polite enough, but no effort of mine could extend a conversation past two or three exchanges. Flowy spoke in a quiet mumble without spaces between his words, and with something like a southern twang. I couldn't really understand him anyway.

Because of Af-Am Week, parties were happening everywhere, and the racial mix of crowds on the quads was, for this long weekend, evenly split between white and black. I stayed in to read, and I was in my underwear, brushing my teeth, when they returned and Rob said, “About to be a couple people rolling through,” as he picked stray clothes off the couch. Flowy and Tavarus, as opposed to earlier, were now giddy and active after the four hours they'd spent out. They cycled through the CDs fanned across the top of our stereo, some of which were mine, albums by the Wallflowers and Faith No More that rarely made it onto the air in our room. Suddenly “Throw Dem Bows” by Ludacris, a hard-driving song with its own dance that I knew and liked, was playing at full volume.

The door was open and people were streaming through, and not just a couple as Rob had advertised: a dozen, then two, then three, until
the apartment was jammed, mostly with strangers from other schools. Daniella Pierce was the only other white person. I was still in my underwear, more or less hiding in the bedroom Ty and I shared. Rob, Tavarus, and Flowy were in the middle of the room, “throwing bows” with the bass line like a black urban version of the chicken dance. To them, this moment must have recalled that party at Columbia High School, when everyone had followed them to the dance and they'd felt like the absolute center of the world. I tried to hang out, but the situation was overwhelming, short on familiar faces, and with all the noise and crowd—there were probably another forty people outside the apartment building waiting to get in—I had no doubt that the campus police would show up eventually. And if the campus police were to show up in our room, smell the weed inside, enter and look around, open Rob's lower right desk drawer or his black trunk . . .

For the first time, our room didn't feel safe to me, and it felt less so when Rob caught me as I was leaving, gestured toward my laptop on the desk, and said, “You probably should put that away if you want it to still be here tomorrow.”

The cops did show up, I learned the next day. Rob had known they would, but he'd also known (or so he claimed) that all they would do was disperse the crowd outside, tell him to turn the music down and keep the front door of the building shut. Any further action would have caused undue racial tension, which had happened many times before during Af-Am Week, and which (or so he claimed) Yale was in a constant state of trying to avoid.

He was so happy during those weekends with his boys, carefree and kinetic, exhibiting a pride that was rare to observe in him and elevated by the pride his friends had for him. His attitude in their presence resembled mine during Parents' Weekend, eager to show off the life he had carved out of this place and his ownership of that life. And while he played down certain aspects of Yale—the girls were generally unattrac­
tive, the guys were stuck-up, most of the parties were “lame as hell”—he relished the brief windows he was able to give the East Orange set into New Haven—or “New Slavin',” as he sometimes called our adopted city.

But the happiest I ever saw Rob in college wasn't when his friends visited. He traveled to Costa Rica during the summer after sophomore year. In addition to his custodial job cleaning up campus after graduation, the lab work that continued into the summer, and a month on Chapman Street with Jackie, he'd gone to visit a friend, an international student at Yale. When school began again, I asked him how the trip had gone. He folded his hands behind his head and looked up toward the ceiling, not smiling exactly but with a far-flung expression, a shedding of anxiety so total that he might have been a Buddhist monk at the door of nirvana. He told me about smoking a blunt alone on a black sand beach on the Pacific Ocean. “I hiked through three miles of jungle to the beach . . . the sand was so soft, so
fine
, volcanic . . . the water blue like you've never seen blue before . . . sky . . . mountains . . . and I rolled a blunt and just sat there, for hours, alone . . . and it was so damn peaceful.”

That trip inspired a passion for travel that would underlie the rest of his life and in college lead him to begin planning a postgraduation trip to Rio de Janeiro, which research and word of mouth had led him to see as the perfect balance between urban and scenic and cultural pleasures. The first thing he did, two years in advance, was begin taking Portuguese classes so he could speak the language.

But before that trip, he had to graduate. The certainty of that event was shaken severely when the master of Pierson College called Rob into his office to address the not-small matter of the drugs he'd been selling.

Chapter 8

Drugs:
The unlawful possession, use, purchase, or distribution of illicit drugs or controlled substances (including stimulants, depressants, narcotics, or hallucinogenic drugs); the misuse of prescription drugs, including sharing, procuring, buying, or using in a manner different from the prescribed use, or by someone other than the person for whom it was prescribed.

This entry in Yale's
Undergraduate Regulations
fell under the list of infractions punishable by expulsion, as ruled by the Executive Committee, a group of seven faculty members and three undergraduates responsible for the “fair, consistent, and uniform enforcement of the Undergraduate Regulations.”

As Rob entered the Pierson master's office in February of his junior year, he was fairly certain that he was walking into an arraignment of sorts, which would be followed by a conjoined trial, judgment, and sentencing under the committee. Whereas his father's conviction had taken three years, he figured his would take in the vicinity of three weeks. Then he would be gone.

“The block is hot.” The expression was used in the drug trade, meaning that the police were sniffing around—not to an extent that should cause panic but a warning to be alert. Rob had said these words, lightly, when I'd found him rifling through his belongings a few days earlier. His black trunk was open in the middle of the room, and he was packing it with bongs, bowls, one-hitters, weed, ledgers, and cash as his pet python, named Dio, meandered lazily around the mulch carpet of its glass tank. He'd bought the two-foot reptile in the fall. Every week or so, I would
drive him to a pet store ten minutes away for snake food: a live mouse. I'd watched Dio's very first feeding with Rob and Ty, like a live Discovery Channel show. Rob dropped the mouse into the tank, and the snake let it exist for a few minutes, just hanging out behind a small log while the rodent frantically pawed at the glass wall. When Dio did decide to move, the act happened fast: a quick, precise strike that kicked up mulch and ended with the mouse—a white, adorable little thing—wrapped tightly in two coils of Dio's body, asphyxiating, one of its eyeballs loose from its socket. The actual ingestion that followed was grotesquely prolonged, Dio's jaws dislocating to encompass five or six times their normal span, the mouse passing through them in slow, millimeter increments. Rob watched the entire process silently, hypnotized. Afterward, the snake didn't move for days as the lump inched down its body by way of peristalsis.

“What are you doing with all your . . . stuff?” I asked, speaking of the black trunk being packed tight with drug paraphernalia.

“Taking it to a friend's.”

He didn't seem too worried, certainly not enough to make me worry. The relocation of incriminating items was just precautionary. This had happened once before sophomore year, and the police had never come. No one came this time, either. What did come was a letter, with a red warning stripe on the envelope and a message three sentences long:

Dear Robert,

You are hereby required to meet in the Master's office tomorrow afternoon at 4 pm. If you have standing obligations, a note can be acquired from the Master's office excusing you. Please be advised that this is an important matter, and failure to appear will result in immediate disciplinary action.

So they knew about his dealing, and the fact that he'd received a formal letter rather than an email suggested that they meant business. Most likely a customer he didn't know well had been caught smoking and betrayed the source. Or maybe Oswaldo had been right, and Rob had been
too cocky, had just assumed that because he'd never been in trouble, he never would. Either way, he was out.

The master's office was directly across the street from our apartment building, no more than twenty steps away. After walking hundreds or even thousands of miles through the dangerous streets of East Orange in the course of his life, after spending dozens of hours on Metro-North trains with a backpack full of drugs, those twenty steps must have been the most anxious of Rob's life. What would he do once he was expelled? He would have to tell Raquel, Daniella, Danny, and Oswaldo, friends who had depended on him to get them through their own harried Yale years. He would have to tell Jacinta in the dining hall, who knew what he did and had constantly warned him to stay safe. He would have to tell Charles Cawley, to whom he'd been sending his transcripts following each semester, with handwritten notes describing his experiences and continuing gratitude. He would have to tell Jackie and subject her to yet another phone call at work during which she would learn that the most important man in her life had failed her.

He must have been thinking about these conversations as he entered the office and waited in one of the three wooden chairs, alongside students there to drop a class or apply for a part-time job. Then the receptionist told him to go in.

The master of Pierson College was a short, bald Slavic literature professor. He was considered one of the “coolest” masters, both because of his patient manner that had helped uncountable numbers of students endure the various pressures they felt Yale placed on them, and because of the annual Jell-O wrestling match he took part in on the Pierson quad. The dean of Pierson College was a petite woman with a sharp German accent, whose job it was to handle things like class schedules, academic conflicts, and discipline. Both had always been kind to Rob and checked in with him often over the years—too often, he sometimes complained, as if they felt he needed extra attention for some reason. Rob slung his backpack over the chair and sat. He said hello to each of them politely and waited for his due.

The meeting lasted twenty minutes, and Rob said very little. The administrators took turns speaking about the seriousness of this infraction, the short- and long-term consequences, the fact that Rob was such a talented guy, so intelligent, so much better than what he was doing. The master focused on the emotional aspect of it, the disservice Rob was doing himself, the opportunity he was squandering; the dean spoke about the institutional side, the Yale ideals Rob had betrayed, the damage it could cause both other students and the university itself. Rob didn't deny anything. He didn't cite financial strain as an excuse. He didn't explode with self-righteous indignation as he had done with Coach Ridley. He nodded his head and kept saying, “Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes . . .”

In the end, they asked him to give his assurance, under the honor code of Yale University, that he would stop dealing drugs entirely. “Yes,” he replied one more time, and he thanked them for their guidance and discretion. He finished by saying, “I'm sorry.”

They let him go. There would be no Executive Committee hearing. There would be no police. There would be no expulsion. And Rob went straight to water polo practice, for which he was thirty minutes late.

Rather than dampen Rob's growing air of untouchability, this brush with authority only elevated it. “It looks bad for the university if someone like me goes down like that,” he told Oswaldo the following night, with a grin and a shrug. “They don't want to mess around with it.” They were in Oswaldo's room in Trumbull College, a Gothic building next to the library. Oswaldo was flustered, bordering on angry. Exactly what he had warned his friend would happen had happened, and yet here was Rob in his leather coat, acting like the Man when he should have been preparing to present his transgressions before the Executive Committee.

“Get the fuck out of my room,” Oswaldo said. “I have to study.”

“Damn,” replied Rob. “Chill. I'm gonna keep it on the down low for a minute.”

“I can't deal with your dumb shit anymore,” Oswaldo said. “You do dumb shit and you know it's dumb shit but it's the same dumb shit you grew up around so you do it anyway. I'm done.”

Oswaldo was dealing with his own shit, in fact, shit that would land him in a white room in Yale's Psychiatric Institute a few weeks later. His brain had begun to crumple under the weight it had to bear: his spiraling family in Newark; his affluent, oblivious classmates whose constant whining about how hard their lives were made him want to turn a gun on them; the daily financial planning involved in keeping up with his tuition payments and the growing debt load in his name; the ever-approaching moment when graduation came and he would be faced with trying to keep his life moving upward—and all of this before he even cracked a textbook to study for his 400-level psychology curriculum. Fantasies of turning a gun on the people around him evolved into turning a gun on his forehead, and suddenly he found himself walking around a nether region of New Haven in the middle of the night, struggling to recall his own name let alone what he was doing here, in the grip of a full-fledged psychotic break. Luckily, his girlfriend had sensed that something was wrong, notified his dean, master, and campus police, and they were able to find him.

Rob visited him in the psychiatric ward almost every day and sat across a table from him in a monitored room for as long as he was permitted, excursions that were similar to a prison visit in purely physical ways: the security checkpoints, the cameras affixed to the ceiling, the bolted metal doors, the space between you and the person sitting across from you just a few feet and yet signifying so much more. Rob would look at his short, rail-thin friend, the friend who had always counseled him wisely if not patiently, and whose counsel he'd refused to take. Now that friend was twitchy and not making much sense at all. Rob would just nod and give him a general update of what was happening on campus and say, “Trust me, you're not missing anything.” His staidness paired with the ability to not treat Oswaldo like a psychiatric patient—sparing him both the hesitancy of speech and overenthusiastic bursts of innocuous information that visits from other friends entailed—was its own form of therapy.

Raquel Diaz firmly believed that “going crazy” was a luxury of the wealthy, because poor people like her had too many responsibilities to
bother with mental health episodes. Though her consciousness was frayed just as Oswaldo's was, she didn't permit herself to seek help. Her grades remained stellar, but her mother couldn't afford the tuition anymore, her classmates seemed to find new and original ways to enrage her, and her boyfriend of two years had had his own psychotic break and had recently been stalking other women and trying to become a rapper. So she took her junior year off to work as an au pair in Italy and then visit China, an opportunity that the college master helped her secure. The hiatus from school was intended to salvage her brain, reassemble her finances, and place some much-needed distance between herself and this campus—to regain a level of perspective that would see her through graduation. Her friends and roommates let her know that this was a shortsighted decision that would delay her life by a full year, remove her from close friendships, and waste so much of the work she'd already put in. When Rob showed up, she was filled with self-doubt and overwhelmed with the task of packing up her room at the end of sophomore year. They spent a full day organizing her possessions, with Rob lugging her furniture down to the basement storage rooms. Throughout, he told her not to worry about what anyone else was telling her, not to worry about anything at all except getting herself right.

“You do what you have to do,” he said more than once that day, and she did, knowing that while she was gone Rob would continue doing what he had to do—not only in terms of dealing and consuming marijuana, but also by carrying whatever burdens he had to carry alone, and walking with order and strength, and striving to help those around him do the same.

A
T THE END
of junior year, Rob began receiving cryptic emails from phony Hotmail accounts.
We are watching you. We know where you are and we are coming. Be prepared. Tonight is the night when it will happen.
Rob wasn't alarmed, paranoid, or impelled to think that he needed to start watching his back again. In fact, he was amused, because the emails meant that he was being “tapped” for a secret society initiation.

The most famous society was Skull and Bones, referenced in the biographies of both Bush presidents and movies both highbrow (
The Good Shepherd
) and lowbrow (
The Skulls
). There were many other societies: Wolf's Head, Scroll and Key, Mace and Chain, Book and Snake, Berzelius, and on and on. Each was composed of twelve seniors chosen by the class preceding them. The oldest societies occupied heavily gated, windowless, sepulcher-like buildings dotting the campus. Being tapped for any society, particularly the older, more secretive ones, was considered an exclusive honor, like a badge that said you had made an impression on this campus during the previous three years. Admission was quietly coveted by many. I, for one, was surprised when Rob went ahead with the initiation for the group that had chosen him, Elihu, named after the university's founder, Elihu Yale. A secret society was in essence yet another version of the manufactured friendships that Yale was, in Rob's view, constantly foisting upon its students. My roommate had always felt, loudly at times, that he had his real friends and didn't have time for facsimiles of friendships. As such, he was not primed to give a shit about another construct asking for his time. Maybe he was curious. Maybe, in a pragmatic way, he was thinking ahead to the future career contacts such an association promised. Maybe he had become more of a Yalie than he'd ever admit.