Mrs. Nero set her mug on the table and said, “Let me think ... Mr. Galba, Mrs. Nerva ... was Mrs. Leo here when you were in school?” I shook my head no and Mrs. Nero said, “That’s it then. Most of us retire after twenty-five years, start drawing our pension, then work in Georgia for a few years to double-dip. Some people you went to school with teach here now though. Mr. Carver teaches pre-calculus and algebra.”
“Mr. Carver?” I asked, and Mrs. Nero said, “Silas Carver,” whispering his first name like it was her social security number.
“No shit,” I said, and Mrs. Nero frowned at my profanity. “I haven’t seen Silas since ...”
I didn’t finish my thought, and Mrs. Nero said, “He usually stays in his room between classes, but you should drop in and see him.”
I said I would, and while Mrs. Nero refilled her coffee across the room, she said, “And of course Coach Crowder is here.” She returned to her seat and added with a quick roll of her eyes, “Though he rarely descends from his ivory tower to grace us with his presence.”
I laughed, but Mrs. Nero looked embarrassed and said, “I shouldn’t have said that. You two are friends.”
“Were friends,” I corrected, and the concern melted from her face.
“Still,” she said, “that was unprofessional. I shouldn’t talk bad about other teachers. It’s just that he ... well, give it a few weeks, you’ll see.” Then, before I could ask her to expound on her vagueness, she said, “Now who would you know at Rome Middle? I believe you were in school with Ms. Wal—”
The morning bell, louder than I’d remembered it, rang out, and I was sick to my stomach. “Shit,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”
This time, Mrs. Nero didn’t flinch at the profanity. She stood up, patted my back, and said, “Just be yourself. You’re going to do fine, Marcus. Have a great first day.”
~ ~ ~
I had a twelfth-grade homeroom, which meant for the first ten minutes of each school day, thirty seniors sat in my classroom and listened to morning announcements. When I was in school, we watched Channel One News, but after they showed two men kissing during a same-sex marriage story ten years ago, a group of concerned Rome parents demanded the school drop the news network. Now we had two minutes of announcements, followed by eight minutes of sitting around, and Principal Trajan told me it was best to enforce a no-talking policy on day one. This seemed a little strict though, so after the second bell rang and everyone found a desk, I said, “It’s okay if you guys talk in here, but I need you to listen during announcements,” but they were all texting each other and paid me no attention. A minute later, when Principal Trajan’s disembodied voice crackled through the speaker mounted above the door, ten seniors slept through his announcements, nineteen did not look up from their phones, and one kid, in a trench coat, in August, stared at me for ten straight minutes.
“I’d like to welcome you all back to Rome,” Principal Trajan said, “and I hope you all had an outstanding summer full of enriching ...”
Principal Trajan spent ten years in the United States Army before starting his career as an educator. He kept his hair cropped short, wore a short-sleeved shirt with a wide tie every day, and said the word “outstanding” a lot. I know having a former military man as your principal sounds scary, but Principal Trajan was a pushover, and the students loved him.
“This being day one,” Principal Trajan said, “here are a few reminders for veterans and recruits alike. No student allowed off campus without a pass. No student allowed in the hallways or bathrooms during class periods without a pass. Students possessing, using, or under the influence of alcohol at school or any school sponsored event will face immediate expulsion. Student attendance at pep rallies is mandatory ...”
Once it became clear Principal Trajan intended to read through the entire student handbook, I sat back and watched my homeroom sleep and play on their phones, while trying not to make eye contact with the trench coat kid who was still staring at me.
“Finally,” Principal Trajan announced, “as you all already know, Rome plays its first football game of the season this Friday, here at the Colosseum, against Riverton.” A couple students looked up from their phones long enough to make whooping noises. “I know Coach Crowder wants a loud and rowdy crowd, so I hope to see you all there. Remember, student admission is free, so no excuses. Again, welcome back to Rome, and I hope you all have an outstanding first day.” The speaker clicked off, and seconds later, the bell rang and the students shuffled out of my room toward their first-period class.
I followed the last student from my classroom, though at a safe distance because it was the trench coat kid, and stood in the doorway watching a river of students course through the hallway. It was like a dream, or maybe a nightmare, being back in my old school, and as I flashed back to roaming those same halls over two decades ago, I became aware of someone standing right in front of me. I glanced down at a mousy-looking girl and realized I was blocking her and half a dozen others’ paths into my classroom. I mumbled an apology and went to my desk and took deep breaths while the room filled up.
This was my first of three periods of freshman English literature, and I was terrified, until I noticed the students. Unlike my homeroom, they were not talking or sleeping or playing on their phones. They squirmed and fidgeted, placed their notebooks on their desks just so, and checked and double-checked the sharpness of their pencils. Then it hit me; these were freshmen, on their first day of high school, and they were even more terrified than I was, and this gave me a small boost of confidence. The bell rang, and one last student sauntered in and said, “Sorry, Teach,” over the giggles of his classmates, before taking a seat near the back. I took one last deep breath, then three more, and wrote my name on the blackboard because that’s what teachers on television do. I turned around and said, “Good morning class,” and pointing toward my name on the board, said, “I’m Mr. Brinks, though I suppose I could have just told you that without writing it on the board.” A couple freshmen laughed, and I felt encouraged, until the mousy-looking girl on the front row raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“That says ‘Mr. Brins’.”
I turned around to more giggles and realized I’d misspelled my own name on my first day teaching English literature. I reached for the chalk, dropped it, picked it up, hit my head on the eraser rail, then squeezed in a k.
“There,” I said, “Brinks, with a k,” and more students found the courage to giggle, though now I wasn’t so sure they were laughing with me. “Okay,” I said, trying to regroup, “this is English literature, which covers everything from Shakespeare to J. K. Rowling—”
“Ain’t you in a band?”
The boy who’d run in after the bell raised his hand to indicate he’d asked the question, which wasn’t exactly how this worked, but whatever.
“I was in a band,” I said, ignoring his use of “ain’t” for the time being.
“What sort of band?” the boy asked.
He had the look and attitude of a quarterback, but there was no way Rome would start a freshman under center, so I figured he was just too dumb to know freshmen were supposed to be scared on their first day of high school.
“A rock band,” I said. “Well, indie rock, I guess.”
A short blonde girl sitting by the air conditioner said, “My mother said your music was obscene,” then blushed and tried to disappear in her seat.
“Did she really?”
The girl nodded and I said, “I’ve never heard anyone else refer to our music as obscene, though Tipper Gore did slap a parental advisory sticker on our album; maybe that’s what your mother was talking about.”
“Tipper who?”
“Al Gore’s wife used to ... never mind ... not important,” I said, and the girl shrugged. “Obscene ... our album wasn’t obscene. It was ... authentic, you know. The lyrics were confessional and about real life, and sure, a couple songs were perhaps a bit graphic ... but, you know, in real life, people have
sex.” The students laughed, and I wished I hadn’t said “sex” only three minutes into my first class, then I continued digging my hole. “And sex is not obscene,” I said. “I’m here, and so are you, because two people had, well ...”
“Laura was adopted,” said a guy with glasses sitting by the wall.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m not sure what—”
“She’s adopted,” the kid with glasses repeated, “so no one had sex to make her.”
“That’s not exactly how adoption—”
“People had sex to make Laura, you moron,” said the guy behind the bespectacled kid. “It’s just her parents have never had sex.”
“Again, that’s not exactly—”
“I don’t understand.” A curly-haired girl by the door asked, thankfully changing the subject, “Why would people want to listen to music about real life? I mean, we all live normal lives. Why would we want to listen to songs about other people’s normal lives in our free time?”
“Great question,” I said, sitting on my desk. “So you believe all art should be pure escapism?” I’d hoped this would initiate an interesting discussion, but now, feeling the focus of her classmates, the curly-haired girl sank into her desk and shrugged.
“My dad said you’re a millionaire,” said the tardy kid who’d first steered the class off course.
I laughed. “No, I’m not a millionaire.”
“Well, how much do you make when someone streams your song?” asked the short blonde girl sitting by the air conditioner.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I’m not sure if anyone streams our songs. We sold half a million records, but that was back in the late nineties.”
There were gasps around the room, and the guy in glasses who believed adopted kids were produced asexually said, “CDs used to cost thirty bucks each, so you are a millionaire.”
“First, CDs cost like sixteen bucks each, so—”
“That’s still eight million dollars,” said the guy behind the guy in glasses, who was surprisingly quick at math.
I shook my head and walked over to the blackboard. “This isn’t math class,” I said, “but before you all run around Rome telling everyone I’m rich, I want you to see this.” I began writing numbers on the board and explained, “The band had a royalty rate of 12 percent, but our producer took three, so 9 percent. Not 9 percent of sixteen bucks though—half of that went to the retailer—we got 9 percent of eight bucks, which is seventy-two cents per album, times half a million is ...”
“$360,000,” said the guy behind the guy in glasses before I could do the math.
“That’s still a lot of money,” said the short blonde by the air conditioner.
“But then the record label took their cut,” I said, “and we had to pay the studio, and the engineer, and session musicians, and there were five of us in the band, so by the time we split—”
“This says you are worth 1.3 million dollars,” said the tardy kid on the back row.
“Wait, what says that?”
“This celebrity net worth website,” he said, holding up his phone like I could read it across the room.
“Okay, maybe after the tour, and the money we got from Nike when they used one of our songs in a commercial ... Yeah, I probably made somewhere around that.”
A murmur of million-dollar excitement passed over the room again, and I held up my hand and said, “But ... but what you’re forgetting is I’d made most of that money by the time I was twenty-three, and I’ll be forty-one in December, so tax it by 30 percent, then divide it by eighteen, and ...”
Around the room, students typed the numbers into the calculators on their phones, and one by one raised their heads in disappointment.
“Wow, my dad makes more money than you do,” said the tardy kid.
“I’m sure he does,” I said.
“My mother does too,” said the curly-haired girl who didn’t want to listen to music about real life.
“Yes,” I said, now feeling the need to defend my career choice to a bunch of high school freshmen, “but the band still has a bit of a cult following, particularly in Paraguay for some reason, and we have a promising plagiarism suit against a boy band I’ve never heard of, and––oh, forget it. Take out your textbooks and let’s talk about William Shakespeare, a man who, I remind you, never came close to making as much money as me.”
“Heartbreaking and haunting. Power pop never gut-punched this hard.”
—SPIN, 10/10 review of Dear Brutus by Dear Brutus, November 22, 1997
Chapter Three (1994)
On Fridays in the fall, pep rallies replaced my seventh-period chemistry class, which isn’t a big deal until you consider there are roughly 180 days in a school year, and that includes the last day before Christmas break, the last day before spring break, the last week of school, and a dozen other days when no one does shit. A hypothetical state championship run would necessitate fifteen pep rallies. Fifteen mandatory pep rallies. Meaning Rome High School, whose chief aim was supposedly to educate the youth of Rome, insisted, under penalty of three days’ suspension or beating with a paddle, that I miss roughly 10 percent of my chemistry instruction to stand in a sweaty gymnasium and implore a cavalcade of meatheads to go, fight, and win tonight.
Rome fielded girls’ and boys’ basketball teams, a baseball team, softball, and track. The school competed in over two dozen sports, and those teams trained and competed hard, but not once was I required to skip a day of balancing chemical equations to rally them with pep. And not to mention the debate team, or scholars’ bowl, or any number of academic squads that were never sent into battle with an ass-shaking routine from the Rome cheerleaders.
I sound bitter. I’m not. It’s Alabama, and it’s football. I get it. If I’m bitter about anything, it’s that Silas was unable to climb to the top of the bleachers where we could hide behind the crowd until the pep rally was over. No, Silas stood on the front row, the floor, and I stood next to him because, apart from Jackson, he was the only person I knew in Rome.
This is how Rome did pep rallies. At two p.m., the bell rang and students from the high school and the middle school next door sprinted toward the gymnasium, which was brand spanking new, while the old school building would likely crumble in a stiff breeze. “You know they didn’t build this for the basketball teams,” Silas told me as I followed him inside. “It’s so the football team will have a nice place to practice when it rains. That’s why they named it after Coach Pumphrey, even though he hates basketball and has suggested shutting down the program more than once.”
High school students filled the home bleachers, middle schoolers sat on the visitors’ side, and we waited in silent anticipation until the crack of a snare drum split the air. The students rose as one and clapped in rhythm as the marching band, dubbed the Rome Marching Legion, marched in, taking its place across the court from the stage. Band in place, the lights cut out, and a kid on the middle school side shouted, “Victory or death!”, which seemed a little intense coming from a twelve-year-old. His classmates cheered him on but soon fell silent as the Rome cheerleaders entered the gymnasium single file, wearing red cloaks and holding candles.
“Are we going to sacrifice a virgin?” I whispered to Silas.
“Good luck finding one in that bunch,” Silas whispered back.
The cheerleaders floated toward the far end of the gym, lined up in front of the stage, and one by one blew out their candles. When the last cheerleader extinguished the last candle, and the gym was dark as a tomb, a bass drum boomed, and the crowd whooped and jumped as one.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“Just watch,” Silas said.
A second bass drum sounded, and again the crowd shouted and jumped as one. Another drum hit followed, then another, and another, each one closer together, each one accompanied by jumping and shouting students until the drumbeats and the jumps and the shouts were an indistinguishable blur of motion and sound. The room lit up, and now on stage, as if
they’d teleported, sat the Rome High School football team, Coach Pumphrey in his purple windbreaker front and center. At the sight of their heroes, the crowd reached hearing-loss decibel levels, while the cheerleaders dropped their cloaks and spread out around the gym to lead cheers, and the band struck up Rome’s fight song, which was a complete rip-off of Michigan’s “Hail to the Victors,” but in their defense, almost all high school fight songs are rip-offs, and, this being Alabama, at least it wasn’t “Dixie.” I watched in reluctant awe as students and teachers alike belted out, “Hail! to the victors valiant. Hail! to the conqu’ring heroes. Hail! Hail! To Rome High School, the champions of the state!”
After the fight song, some seniors performed a skit where a Roman gladiator beheaded a hapless Confederate soldier—Rome played the Helvetii Hills Rebels that night—then five minutes of cheers followed, one where fans on the high school side informed fans on the middle school side that we, indeed, had spirit, before inquiring about them. Next, the cheerleaders treated us to a routine involving more writhing around on the floor than most adults in attendance were probably comfortable with, and finally, the team captains addressed their subjects.
First, a three-hundred-pound man-child wearing number 69 grabbed the microphone and screamed, “This is our house!” The crowd roared, and the behemoth raised both arms in triumph.
“Marshall Ford,” Silas said to me. “Dude says the same garbage every week. He’s about to inform us that no one comes into our house and pushes us around.”
Marshall Ford stepped back to the microphone and screamed, “And no one comes into our house and pushes us around!” The crowd erupted again, and Silas shook his head and laughed.
Deacon Cassburn stepped to the microphone next, and girls squealed and screamed until the blond god blushed, stepped back, and stared at his cowboy boots, which made the girls scream and squeal even louder.
“This happens every week too,” Silas said. “That dick slap loves it.”
Deacon’s adoring fans finally stopped screaming—they may have all passed out—and again he stepped to the microphone and said, “If y’all come out and see us tonight ...”
The Rome of Fall Page 2