The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (40 page)

“What the hell are you reading?” Julio asked.

“P-chem,” Rob mumbled, turning the book away. “Physical chemistry.”

“Why?”

“Just trying to stay up to speed, you know.”

“Peace, who the fuck are you?”

Before the dispatcher told them to move again, Julio learned where Rob had gone to college and that he'd been a science teacher. Rob told him to keep that on the down low, but Julio couldn't help propagating the news—it was too damn strange, funny even. A low-key movement began to start calling him the “Professor,” like his preschool teachers once had. The glare Rob gave in response cut the effort off at the head with the surety of a guillotine. Then they called him Peace again and let him read his books without hazing.

“I don't get it, if I'd gone to Yale, I'd be fucking
proud
of it. I'd be telling
everyone.
” Rob and Lisa Wingo were in the smoking section of the
garage, both freezing. Lisa worked at the check-in gates. She was five one and stout, and she spoke fast and constantly. When she wasn't talking, she was laughing. They'd become friends when Rob had said, “You don't shut the fuck up much, do you?”

“I'm a single mother of a girl in middle school. If I shut the fuck up, she'll start talking and I'll never get a word in again.”

When their shifts coincided, they'd have a drink afterward at a bar near the airport called Terminal One. He came by her apartment in Elizabeth fairly often and helped her daughter, Dawn, with homework. The girl was as sassy as they came, but when Rob was around, she would just stare fawningly at him while he guided her through fifth-grade reading lists and simple division. Like his father, Rob insisted on proper, legible handwriting. After bedtime, Rob would stay and drink and watch TV and usually sleep on the couch. He called Lisa “Oompa Loompa” for her particular shape; she called him “Predator” for his dreadlocks (the same name he'd divined for Ty's girlfriend in college). He brought food, checked in often on the phone, and in many ways filled the gaping absence left by her daughter's father. Rumors began among the smokers that they were dating. “I could never date that man,” Lisa replied. “We both like to needle each other too much. But someone should—he sure as hell is nice to have around.”

More than a few workers at the airport talked behind Rob's back, with a thick sense of schadenfreude, about the fact that a Yale grad had no business doing what he did, that he was taking a good job from someone who actually needed it, that his aloof demeanor was tied to the smugness of thinking he was better than everyone else, that he must be some kind of fuckup to have ended up where he was. Lisa knew that Rob was not smug, and she wanted to believe that this place was not where he'd ended up but rather where he was starting out. Tomorrow, or the day after that, or sometime very soon, he'd be gone, doing something far beyond the limited minds in the employee smoking area of Newark International. She looked forward to telling the “haters” what exactly that something was.

She wondered often why he involved himself in her life, why he
seemed so motivated to take care of her. She knew he had other responsibilities, his mother, his house, his vast network of friends and family, his long nights dealing drugs, his travel. But very few days passed without at least a text, even if that text originated in Croatia. Most men she'd known, both romantic and platonic, followed the same pattern of being around only until a more attractive situation than the single mother of a plucky adolescent living in an airport-adjacent neighborhood presented itself. Rob wasn't drawing any tangible benefit from her; she wasn't much of a cook, and he certainly wasn't getting laid. Aside from her sense of humor that aligned closely with his, the transaction, as it were, felt lopsided. But still the months passed, and his affection for her family, if anything, grew—as did the weight that seemed to press always downward on his broad shoulders. And Lisa realized that Rob did mine value from her, and that evenings spent in her messy apartment doing fifth-grade homework and watching sitcom reruns were an escape for him. An escape from what, exactly, he would never let her know.

Oswaldo Gutierrez knew. He was almost finished with med school at Penn, and he'd seen Rob plenty over the last few years, as Rob would loop through Philadelphia after visits to the Raymond brothers in Browns Mills. For the most part, these visits were easy. Together for a night, they could smoke and chill and just talk, complaining some, commiserating, thinking out loud. But as 2009 began, Oswaldo noticed a circular aspect to Rob's speech and manners, a narrowing of vision in a man who, in college, had been more curious and knowledgeable than seemingly any of the five thousand Yale undergraduates surrounding him. Like the planes that circled above the airport when the ground crew caused runway delays, he fell into a holding pattern of carping about his life while hunched over a joint on Oswaldo's sofa: tenants, rent, Carl, women, work, money, even his mother. His laments were small and tiresome—
this motherfucker . . . that motherfucker . . . I'm so tired of all this stupid-ass shit, man
—and yet they instilled a deep sadness in Oswaldo as he, in the analytical way of the psychiatrist he was studying to become, isolated the man he had first encountered at Yale and placed him alongside the one bemoaning the annoyances of his life here, now,
seven years later.

Oswaldo had been there for Rob through all of the experiences that now separated those two versions of the same man, and unlike most of Rob's current friends, he was linked into the space that college inhabited in Rob's psyche. He could trace the many events and patterns that, though sometimes innocuous in the happening, had accumulated with a rigid scientific surety to produce this man, whose generosity and intelligence were matched only by his flaws.

“All I'm asking for is some numbers. Nothing on you. Just people to call.”

Rob was asking Oswaldo for drug contacts in Philadelphia, perhaps classmates of his who smoked, so that he could hustle there.

“Get the fuck out,” Oswaldo replied. He opened the door.

“Damn,” Rob said. “So it's like this now?”

“Yeah,” Oswaldo replied. “It's like this.”

And Rob left, rolling his eyes like this scene was just part of a comedy in which he was the focal point of the farcical behavior of those around him. And Oswaldo understood now with a clarity he'd never had before that all of Rob's troubles were self-inflicted—that on Yale graduation day Rob had stood within reach of everything he now didn't have. Maybe Yale hadn't guaranteed fame and wealth and general greatness, but it had ensured, at the very least, stability. Oswaldo had never been as smart as his friend, but he'd sorted his life out with the same odds against him. He was six months from earning an MD and had a probable job waiting for him near Boston counseling abused youths. He'd figured it out. And Rob was still clinging, after all these years, to the idea of being the Man. Oswaldo was no longer interested in seeing what that looked like up close.

T
Y
C
ANTEY'S DAUGHTER
, Akira, was tottering around on the hardwood floor of our dining room in West Hollywood, giggling as she repeatedly attempted to grab hold of our dog's ears.

“Have you heard from Rob lately?” I asked.

Ty, sitting beside his wife, Raina, leaned back and said with low-key regret, “I really haven't, man. It's hard to keep track of him, you know? Because he's always traveling, and he's always changing his fucking phone number.”

“Is he on Facebook?” Rebecca asked.

Ty laughed. “Rob would
never
join Facebook. That would be funny, though.”

“If you track down his number, would you text it to me?” I asked. “I haven't seen that guy since our wedding.”

“That was a fun wedding,” Ty said. (I had already roasted him with the story of my bachelor party, when we'd been standing on a street corner debating what to do next, and Ty had made the decision for everyone by saying, “I took the
Fung Wah bus
down here, motherfucker, and I am going to see some
titties.
”)

“Not as fun as yours,” Rebecca replied. Ty and Raina had had a Hare Krishna ceremony in her hometown of Kansas City, and we recalled the white man, bald except for a two-inch-long gray ponytail, singing endless verses of
“Hare hare kriiiishnaaaa”
as a stall tactic since Ty, when the wedding was supposed to begin, had still been back at his in-laws' house in his underwear, looking for a tie.

Ty and his family were in Los Angeles for Raina's fifth-year reunion at USC, and we'd had them over for dinner at our small one-bedroom. We felt oddly grown-up, having a dinner party with my old roommate: late-night eater of soy burgers, wearer of FUBU, now on the verge of becoming a real doctor. He'd opted out of the PhD component of his degree so he could get out of school and start earning money. Raina, a beauty and a pistol whom he'd met at Harvard Medical School, was pregnant with their second daughter (though that apparently hadn't stopped her from hip-hop dancing for hours at the reunion the night before). I noticed my wife beside me staring at Raina's belly. Attention had already been paid to that particular element, with congratulatory embraces, the females talking about morning sickness and maternity
clothes, Ty looking shell-shocked as he tried to imagine a near future surrounded by three women, two of them under twenty months old. I knew very well the unavoidable gloom welling up in my wife, however; after three miscarriages and many tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt run up for fertility treatments, she had a hard time being in close proximity to people who bore children effortlessly, by accident. The concept of getting “knocked up” was one that my wife would never know.

Life was supposed to be easier. This current ran beneath all our laughter about college and weddings and pregnancy, and it rose to the surface when I mentioned that my second novel had failed to find a publisher—more than two years of work, wasted—and that my third was losing steam (I mentioned this self-effacingly, with a shrug and a smile that suggested old clichés of the journey, not the destination, being what mattered). The side gigs I took copyediting self-published books that would never be read barely contributed to our income, let alone our future that we hoped would involve children. The current rose again when Ty tried to explain the economics of his and Raina's career trajectory: the half million dollars of student debt they now carried between them, the unlikelihood of being placed in residencies in the same city when they graduated, the ultimate aim to open a dermatology practice in Kansas City, so her family could help with child care, which would be difficult because the market there was saturated. We weren't speaking out of self-pity so much as presenting facts, and though none of us mentioned it outright, the facts spoke of something alarming about the world in which we lived and the generation we were a part of: among the four of us we shared over twenty years of education at Ivy League schools, and we were all motivated and hardworking, and none of us were currently able to make life function beyond the short term. As Ty said at one point near the end of dinner, “It's like,
what the fuck
?”

As they left with their daughter, we swore that we would figure out some way to have a reunion with Rob. He was missed that night.

“What would Rob have told us during the pity party?” I asked.

“Rob would have told us to quit being a bunch of bitches,” Ty replied.

Before we went to bed later, Rebecca told me, “Make sure you follow up on that reunion with Rob.”

“Sure, sure,” I replied.

“Seriously, you should do that. It's not right that you haven't seen him in three years.”

“I know.”

But like so many promises made to oneself, that, too, was quickly forgotten.

R
OB AND
T
AVARUS
, after many months of loose-ended talk, came up with a new vision for Peace Realty, which involved the Section 8 housing program in the city. Tavarus knew all about this domain, having grown up in and around its living spaces. In his admittedly biased opinion, the program was nothing more than a scam in which suburban landlords charged the city of Newark premium rents so that struggling families could live in severely neglected apartments. In the meantime, the Great Recession had begun to wreak havoc on the outlying neighborhoods. Just as Jackie had noticed the For Sale signs sprouting weedlike around Newark during the white flight of the '60s and '70s, Tavarus and Rob witnessed a new flourishing of abandoned, foreclosed homes. The encroaching blight was personal to them. These were the blocks they called home. They watched as properties—seven or eight in a block in the poorest stretches—first went dark in the windows, then were stapled with red-inked city housing forms, then grew waist-high weeds in the yard now surrounded by a chain-link fence, then had the windows smashed—by homeless people looking for shelter, or junkies looking for a place to shoot up, or looters scavenging pipes and appliances to sell for scrap—and then, in the final throes of this slow demise, had coffinlike boards replace the windows. The process affected them deeply, particularly when they'd known the former occupants, which they often did, and more so when those occupants had children, which they often had.

In their imaginings, the city would sell Peace Realty a few of these abandoned homes at a wholesale rate in the neighborhood of $20,000. They would themselves invest an additional $15,000 to $20,000 in renovations to bring them to a suitable standard far above the Section 8 code requirements. Once fixed up, they would sell these holdings back to the city at around $50,000 to $75,000, still below market rate, and the properties would be incorporated into the Section 8 program as owned homes rather than rented apartments. The way they saw it, the city would be saving money overall by not having to pay premium rents, a few families would have a chance for stability, and Rob and Tavarus would be making anywhere between $10,000 and $25,000 profit—a negligible amount for a typical real estate firm but a life-changing income for the Burger Boyz. If the first round turned out successfully, they would have leverage to expand the enterprise, and soon they would be making six figures a year. That was a career, and one they could feel good about.