Julius “Flowy” Starkes

Julius “Flowy” Starkes is one of Rob Peace’s closest friends from St. Benedict’s Preparatory School and one of the figures who most clearly embodies the survival intelligence of Rob’s Newark world. Tall, extremely thin, and marked by an almost permanently hangdog expression, Flowy grew up amid severe poverty, family violence, and the constant danger of the neighborhood around 18th Avenue off the Garden State Parkway. Yet his defining quality is not simply hardship. He is known for moving through danger without making himself its target, combining humor, familiarity, and an instinct for de-escalation with the capacity to act decisively when necessary. His friendship with Rob lasts from high school into adulthood, linking the school’s disciplined promise to the unstable streets and informal obligations that continue to shape Rob’s choices.

Identity and Background

Flowy and his twin sister, Tess, were raised in circumstances so poor and violent that ordinary childhood protections scarcely existed. Their father was killed by violence, while their mother was troubled enough to damage their formative years, though not so visibly incapacitated that social services intervened in their home. The family lived at the center of greater Newark’s network of drugs and violence, where a person could be killed merely for walking down a street claimed by another group. Flowy’s nickname expresses his adaptation to that environment: he could exist casually within a dangerous grid, passing through its social boundaries without provoking the violence surrounding him.

The warning he remembered from his father—“You ain’t gonna live to see twenty-one.”—was delivered without the ceremonial weight of prophecy, but it became an unsettling measure of the life Flowy had inherited. His later choices can be read against that forecast. He did not escape danger by pretending it was absent; he learned to recognize its patterns and move through them. That ability, rather than a conventional display of authority, is the foundation of his social power.

Flowy was six feet five inches tall and weighed only 150 pounds. His body made him awkward in the narrow hallways of St. Benedict’s, where he could barely fit behind classroom desks, but the same body became an advantage in the swimming pool. With a sharp scissor kick, he could rise from the water to his waist and extend his long arms still higher, creating towering shooting angles that opponents struggled to defend. The contrast between his ungainly appearance on land and his control in the pool gives his character a physical logic: what looks like vulnerability in one setting becomes leverage in another.

St. Benedict’s and the Water Polo Bond

Flowy chose St. Benedict’s independently and paid for it himself, using Social Security checks to cover school supplies. His decision was practical and preventative. He believed that attending public school, where girls and the expectations of his surroundings would shape daily life, could lead him into fatherhood by sixteen, repeating the pattern from which he himself had been born. St. Benedict’s offered an alternative structure, but reaching it required him to invest scarce resources in a future that was not guaranteed.

At school, Flowy became part of the unusual water polo group that included Rob Peace, Tavarus Hester, and Curtis Gamble. The boys initially knew little about one another’s histories. They talked instead about music, food, parties, practice, teachers, and coaches. Their bond formed through ordinary teenage exchanges, while their unspoken pasts gradually revealed how closely their lives intersected. They understood themselves as members of what might have been the only all-minority water polo team in the country, perhaps even the world. The team therefore functioned as both athletic unit and social refuge, a place where bodies trained for coordinated movement while the boys learned to trust one another without immediately disclosing the dangers they carried from home.

Flowy’s connection to Rob also appears in the discipline of shared routine. During one summer, Rob, Flowy, and Tavarus trained four days a week at the public pool in Columbian Park. They swam one hundred laps and practiced shooting at a homemade net kept afloat by empty milk jugs. Afterward they went to Curtis’s house to eat, play video games, and complete schoolwork during St. Benedict’s Summer Phase. The sequence joined athletic effort, friendship, food, and academic obligation; it was an improvised structure of mutual advancement built from public facilities and family homes rather than abundant institutional resources.

The group also used humor to negotiate class difference and wounded pride. When Tavarus became angry during a stay at the Maine estate of Charles Cawley over words about shoes, Rob mocked the disproportion between his circumstances and the luxury around him, invoking steak, lobster, private bedrooms, private bathrooms, and a maid. Flowy answered by telling Rob that he should bring the party supplies on the next trip. The exchange is characteristic of Flowy’s place in the group: he can puncture tension with a joke, but the joke also acknowledges the boys’ complicated passage between Newark deprivation and elite abundance.

Mediation, Conflict, and Loyalty

Flowy’s reputation for moving through conflict is tested when St. Benedict’s students become involved in a street fight with students from Central High School, Newark. The confrontation begins in a world where words carry the force of dignity, pride, and self-worth because income and possessions are limited. Insults become fists, and the fight expands until teachers from St. Benedict’s intervene and are drawn into the melee. From an upper floor, Rob and his friends watch their classmates being overwhelmed by Central’s greater numbers. Rob prepares to descend, but Curtis restrains him by the shoulders.

Flowy offers a different response. He quietly says, “I’ll go down there. I know those boys. I’ll talk.” His proposed intervention depends on recognition rather than force. He is not claiming that the conflict is harmless; he is relying on relationships that cross the boundary between the schools. By the time he and Rob get dressed to find familiar faces and pacify the situation, police have arrived and seven people are in handcuffs. Even so, Flowy goes to the front steps of Central at the end of the day, locates people he knows, tries to determine what happened, and works to ensure that everyone is calm. His role is not to erase the consequences of violence but to prevent the conflict from spreading further.

The same pattern appears when a fight breaks out later in adulthood. Flowy knows one of the men involved and talks him down while Tavarus moves Rob toward their car. Again, Flowy’s usefulness lies in his ability to enter a volatile social situation without amplifying it. He understands the people involved, speaks in a register they will hear, and creates enough space for Rob to be removed. His mediation is a form of practical courage, grounded in local knowledge rather than official authority.

Flowy’s loyalty to Rob remains active even when their lives diverge. When Rob returns from Rio de Janeiro, Flowy picks him up at Newark International Airport after dark. The gesture is ordinary on its surface, but it places Flowy at the point where Rob’s imagined escape returns to Newark’s night. Years later, when Rob’s tire blows out at one in the morning on the Merritt Parkway, Flowy immediately drives an hour each way, pays the tolls, brings a spare, and works the jack. Rob knows a great deal about science and many other subjects but is helpless with cars; Flowy supplies the practical competence his friend lacks.

Connection to Rob’s Drug Economy and Adult Life

Flowy is also connected to the informal economy that follows Rob from Yale back into Newark. Rob’s initial marijuana connection comes through Flowy. That connection eventually disappears, probably because the person fled town to avoid conflict with a rival, the police, or both. The episode demonstrates the instability of the drug business: relationships are provisional, suppliers vanish, and every new connection exposes the participants to new risks.

Later, Flowy, Tavarus, and Drew Jemison do not understand why Rob continues dealing with Carl, whose instability makes the operation more dangerous. They believe more stable people would readily help Rob obtain marijuana. Their criticism identifies the contradictions of Rob’s position. He must appear relaxed while also seeming tough and imposing; he must keep business fluid while maintaining enough authority to protect the difference between cost and profit. Working with someone quick to take offense at real or imagined slights threatens that balance. Flowy’s perspective is therefore not merely moral disapproval. It is a practical judgment about risk, reputation, and the fragile infrastructure of illegal commerce.

Flowy’s own precarious position is part of the adult contrast among Rob’s former classmates. By the time Rob is trying to understand what he owes to his friends, some have established decent jobs, while Tavarus has been arrested for possession with intent to distribute and Flowy is living more precariously. Rob tries to become the “Man” among them, sending money when someone needs rent or children’s clothes, providing rides when cars break down, and showing up when friends are bored or isolated. Flowy’s assistance with the blown tire reveals that this dependence is reciprocal. Rob may distribute money and logistical help, but the network also sustains him through favors that cannot be purchased as easily as they can be performed.

Flowy remains part of the Burger Boyz, the circle of friends who can briefly recover the simpler social world of high school at house parties in East Orange. A photograph places Rob Peace, Curtis Gamble, Shariff Upton, Drew Jemison, and Flowy together at one such gathering. The image compresses years of change into a shared frame: former students, coaches, and friends temporarily return to the atmosphere of their water polo years, even though adulthood has carried them into unequal and increasingly precarious circumstances.

Narrative Role and Significance

Flowy serves as a counterpoint to Rob’s intellectual ambition and volatility. Rob can move between St. Benedict’s, Yale, scientific research, drug dealing, teaching, airport labor, and real-estate plans, but those transitions repeatedly produce friction. Flowy’s movement is less conspicuous and more embodied. He reads streets, recognizes people, knows when to speak, and understands how to keep a conflict from becoming a catastrophe. His nickname thus becomes a social method: he flows between groups, locations, and moods without surrendering his connection to the people who made him.

His presence also complicates any simple opposition between achievement and failure. Flowy’s poverty, family history, athletic ability, school choice, precarious adulthood, and repeated acts of loyalty show that intelligence and effort do not produce a single predictable route. He uses the limited resources available to him to attend St. Benedict’s, develops an extraordinary capacity in the pool, and helps preserve friendships through crises, yet the larger economic and social environment remains dangerous. The book’s attention to him makes the Newark–Yale divide visible not as a clean separation but as a network of continuing obligations.

Flowy is especially important because he understands Rob without fully sharing Rob’s belief that every problem can be solved through personal force of will. He knows the cost of negotiating over small sums in dangerous streets, the risks embedded in unstable suppliers, and the necessity of keeping people calm. When Rob’s plans collapse or his anger threatens to carry him into violence, Flowy often appears as the friend who can translate danger into immediate action: talk someone down, drive someone away, bring a spare tire, or meet a plane after dark. His loyalty does not eliminate the forces pressing on Rob, but it reveals the dense human infrastructure within which Rob’s life unfolds.