Flowy

Flowy is one of the most enduring figures in Rob Peace’s life: a St. Benedict’s teammate, a member of the Burger Boyz, a participant in Rob’s marijuana economy, and finally a grieving friend whose tattoo preserves the bond after Rob’s death. His story is defined by contrast. At St. Benedict’s, he was a promising athlete whose talent seemed capable of opening a path to college; afterward, that promise narrowed into lifeguarding, landscaping, precarious housing, and dependence on the local streets he knew almost perfectly. Through Flowy, the book measures the distance between youthful collective possibility and the uneven adult outcomes that follow when money, injury, credentials, and geography determine who can continue moving forward.

Identity and Early Promise

Flowy came of age alongside Rob, Tavarus, Drew, and Curtis at St. Benedict’s, where the boys called themselves the Burger Boyz because they gathered between classes and practices at the Burger King around the corner. The group’s friendship was grounded in ordinary repetition—school, football and water-polo commitments, food, jokes, and the long hours spent together—but it also exposed the unequal material circumstances beneath their camaraderie. Rob often did not buy food for himself and sometimes sucked on ketchup packets for the salt; his friends recognized that the behavior reflected anxiety about money, just as they had noticed that the lights or heat at his home were sometimes shut off. Flowy belonged to the circle that saw both Rob’s intelligence and his need, and Tavarus’s occasional payments to Rob for directing marijuana business added an economic layer to their friendship.

Flowy’s strongest early distinction was athletic. The Burger Boyz won their first tournament at the Lawrenceville School near Princeton and placed second at Wesleyan University in Connecticut; they ultimately finished two victories short of the Mid-Atlantic championship. Flowy was selected to the All-Regional First Team, and a referee told him that he could help put him on track for a scholarship to UMass. The prospect mattered because Flowy understood the financial barrier between St. Benedict’s and college. While Curtis considered Morehouse and party schools in Atlanta, Tavarus struggled upward from a 0.7 GPA to 2.1, and Rob considered Seton Hall, Flowy heard the repeated possibility of a scholarship as a route beyond the limited resources surrounding him.

That route never opened. By the summer of 1998, Flowy had not even applied to college because the hope of affording it had been extinguished. A coach at St. Benedict’s helped him find summer work as a lifeguard with the Department of Parks & Recreation, and he later worked between seasons for a landscaper blowing leaves. His friends left for colleges including Daniel Webster College, the University of Georgia–Clarkson, Johnson C. Smith, and Morehouse, while Flowy remained tied to paid work and the neighborhood. The divergence was made visible during their last summer together: Rob had a sphinx tattooed on his right biceps from a drawing by Victor, while the group gathered for nostalgic lunches and barbecues before dispersing into different futures.

Neighborhood Knowledge and Economic Precarity

Flowy rented an apartment with his girlfriend, LaQuisha, near Vailsburg Park, on a street only marginally safer than the one where he had grown up. The building had loud neighbors and hallways busier at two in the morning than at two in the afternoon, although his fifth-floor apartment offered an eastward view toward downtown Newark. From above, East Orange could look peaceful on autumn evenings, but Flowy’s daily life remained organized around the risks and limits of the neighborhood. His knowledge of the local terrain was both practical expertise and confinement: he knew the streets of East Orange almost block by block, yet felt increasingly unable to conduct business safely outside Newark.

Flowy became one of Rob’s early links to the marijuana trade. When Rob asked whether he knew a reliable supplier, Flowy explained the role of a “connect,” a bulk source who sold marijuana to small-time dealers at a lower price while assuming less direct risk. Flowy introduced Rob to his source, and Rob later directed Tavarus to him when others asked for larger quantities. Tavarus lived on Halsted Street with his grandmother, aunt, and numerous cousins, and he supplied real quantities through his older brother; after Rob sent business his way, Tavarus slipped Rob a twenty-dollar bill. These exchanges show the Burger Boyz’s economy as a network of favors, commissions, and mutual dependence rather than a purely impersonal market.

Flowy also recognized the danger of Rob’s changing appearance. When Rob left his apartment wearing the leather jacket Zina had given him, Flowy watched him walk toward Chapman Street and worried that the jacket advertised money to young dealers. He wondered whether Rob had become so accustomed to the security and affluence he associated with Yale that he had lost the street-level awareness needed to remain safe. Flowy did not stop him, partly because Rob was known to be capable of protecting himself, but the scene reveals a division in their experience: Flowy remained alert to the immediate signals of danger, while Rob increasingly moved between worlds whose rules did not always agree.

The Burger Boyz and Rob’s Illegal Economy

The friends’ circumstances continued to separate after college. When Tavarus and Flowy visited Yale during Af-Am Week in Rob’s junior year, their guarded manner reflected the reversals in their lives. Tavarus had dropped out of college and returned to Newark, living with his brother in a run-down apartment near Section 8 housing and a substantial drug den while trying to enter real estate through his earlier title-research experience. Flowy had torn two ligaments in his knee while lifeguarding and had been unable to work for a month. Both had once appeared to be moving toward promising futures at St. Benedict’s; by then, both were uncertain how to regain that trajectory.

Flowy’s local reach made him useful to Rob, but it also limited him. He knew every block within the three square miles of East Orange and could see downtown Newark in one direction and the wooded rise toward South Orange in the other. Those sight lines represented his domain. Beyond Newark, however, he felt a kind of agoraphobia, and his inability to operate in unfamiliar markets reduced his ability to benefit from the larger opportunity Rob was trying to create. He and Rob had once taken pride in being the only Burger Boyz who sold marijuana seriously; later, the same division of labor left Flowy dependent on Rob’s wider connections.

Rob’s ambition to become a major provider intensified the tension. He gave friends money for rent, children’s clothing, car repairs, and marijuana, and he treated illegal income as a means of sustaining people close to him. Flowy understood the structural hostility facing Rob and warned that respectable institutions would not readily reward a Black man like him. In the proposal Rob and Tavarus were preparing, Flowy’s blunt observation that the deck was stacked against them was not a dismissal of their real-estate plans but a reminder that their qualifications would not erase racism, capital shortages, or Newark’s reputation. He still dreamed of saving a few thousand dollars to leave the city, yet for the present took pride in his carefully maintained 1996 Ford Bronco and in knowing the streets by heart.

Flowy was present when Rob articulated his theory of the “gray area,” the moral space Rob believed ambitious people had to occupy in order to reach the top. Rob compared early hustling and misconduct attributed to famous musicians, presidents, and politicians, treating compromise as a shared condition of success. Flowy did not like the logic, but he remained inside the circle that heard it. His unease registers the cost of Rob’s self-justification: the friends were not simply investors or accomplices, but witnesses to the argument by which Rob converted risk into necessity and necessity into a theory of greatness.

Loyalty, Crisis, and Grief

Flowy’s loyalty endured even as the partnership became more dangerous. When Rob’s large marijuana operation ran for several weeks, the group moved close to a pound a day despite monthly overhead of roughly $8,000. Early profits repaid the investments of Curtis, Tavarus, Drew, and Flowy. Rob used his own share for back mortgage payments on the Greenwood house, support for Jackie, repairs to the Chapman Street house, and Frances’s medical costs, while again helping friends with rent and car repairs. Flowy’s participation therefore belonged to the same tangled economy of friendship and obligation that Rob claimed as his reason for continuing: money moved through the group as investment, repayment, protection, and care.

When Kamar’s betrayal threatened the operation, Flowy was among those drawn into the crisis. Rob pleaded for three days to repair the damage, insisting that Kamar would not act quickly and that he could make things right. The request exposed the precariousness beneath the operation’s apparent scale. The business could move product rapidly, but it depended on trust, couriers, local knowledge, and people whose loyalties could change. Flowy’s position was especially vulnerable because his usefulness came from his neighborhood command, while the operation’s expansion demanded reach beyond the streets he knew.

After Rob was shot at 34 Smith Street, Flowy became one of the first friends to confront the reality of the death. Tavarus called him in a panic, and Flowy drove to Smith Street but could not pass the yellow police tape. From the porch, Tavarus called out that he should go take care of Jackie. Flowy tried to approach the obligation, but grief made even speech uncertain. He called for Jackie without knowing what he meant to say, then returned to his apartment on Munn Avenue, where LaQuisha was away and repeated calls went unanswered. He lay in the dark listening to cars, dogs, and sirens, isolated inside the same neighborhood sounds that had always surrounded his life.

Jackie asked that the Burger Boyz not attend Rob’s funeral, and Nathan conveyed the request two days after the death. Flowy and Drew were initially angry, especially because the funeral was held at St. Benedict’s; they feared that their absence would make them appear culpable in a community that still mattered to them. Flowy asked how they could lose someone they had seen almost every day since the age of fourteen and not attend his funeral. The question expresses the collision between public suspicion and private attachment. They ultimately remained absent, honoring Jackie’s request while losing the communal ceremony through which they might have mourned Rob.

Memory and Narrative Significance

Flowy transformed grief into a permanent sign of allegiance by having the words “Real Peace Never Die BB4Life” tattooed on his arm. The inscription does more than commemorate Rob: it preserves the Burger Boyz identity after the group’s shared future has been destroyed. Rob is dead, the killers have not been brought to justice, and Flowy’s attempts to repair his relationship with Jackie are rebuffed by relatives answering her phone. The book presents reconciliation with Jackie as, in some ways, harder to imagine than legal accountability for the murderers, leaving Flowy with a memorial bond but without access to the woman the friends had called “Ma.”

The Burger Boyz later gathered again in the backyard of 34 Smith Street with floating lanterns. Their first attempts failed—the paper balloons ripped or caught fire—and they joked about how frustrated Rob would have been at their mechanical ineptitude. Eventually they devised a two-person method, one friend holding each lantern open while another lit the charcoal, and the lights rose over the yard where they had gathered for almost two decades. Flowy’s presence in that ritual places him within the group’s full arc from fourteen-year-old students to young men whose mistakes accumulated in the gray interval of adulthood. The lanterns turn a shared backyard into a temporary memorial landscape, while the tattoo carries the same remembrance on his body.

Flowy therefore serves as both character and measure of the lost alternatives surrounding Rob. His athletic distinction, scholarship hope, lifeguarding work, landscaping, local expertise, criminal partnership, and unwavering attachment do not form a simple fall from innocence. They reveal how a person can possess talent, discipline, intimate knowledge, and loyalty while still being confined by injury, money, geography, and the uneven distribution of second chances. His grief gives the book its most intimate account of Rob’s death, but his life also supplies the larger pattern: the Burger Boyz began as a brotherhood formed by shared possibility, and Flowy survives as the friend who remembers exactly how much of that possibility was once visible.