“If you do what, Mrs. Brinks?” Rita asked, setting down a tray of food for my mother to ignore.
“Shuffle off this mortal coil,” my mother said, and Rita laughed.
“Don’t worry, Marcus,” Rita said. “I’ll keep her alive till curfew.”
“Curfew?” I said. “What if things go well and this girl invites me back to her place?”
Mother put her fingers in her ears and said, “Take me now, Jesus.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said, checking my hair in the mirror. “You’re free to make me uncomfortable, but I can’t return the favor.”
“Yes, Marcus, because morphine and making people uncomfortable are the only perks of dying. When you’re dying, you can make people uncomfortable too. It’s the circle of life.”
“Fair enough,” I said and re-did my tie because the shirt didn’t look right without one.
Rita fluffed my mom’s pillows and cleaned the nightstand and asked, “So who is this hot date with anyway?”
I mumbled something, and Mom and Rita looked up in unison.
“Who?” Mom asked.
“Becca Walsh,” I said, and Rita, who by now must have known all our family secrets, raised an eyebrow and turned on one heel to leave the room.
“Marcus, never mind everything I told you,” Mom said. “I’m going to die in the next hour or so. You’d better cancel your date. You’ll want to be here to listen to my deathbed confessions.”
“Very funny,” I said.
“Seriously, I plan to tell you where I buried my treasure and how to contact your long-lost sister in New Mexico.”
“Mom.”
“Her name is Traci. You’ll like her.”
“Mom.”
“I’m not joking, Marcus. I can see the Reaper. He’s standing right behind you, choking on your cologne.”
“Mom, we are the only two single people our age in Rome.”
“That hasn’t slowed her down.”
I sighed. “What does that—never mind. I don’t want to know. It’s dinner, Mom. Just dinner.”
I kissed my mother on the forehead and said, “Don’t wait up.”
“I’ll have Rita call you when I die.”
I stopped in the doorway and said, “I’m turning off my phone.”
“Don’t forget your curfew.”
“I already have.”
“Traci never treated me this way.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
~ ~ ~
Becca lived in a two-bedroom cottage on Eagle Court, a couple blocks from Rome High School. A tall oak with a tire swing hung from its thickest branch shaded her front yard, and oleanders were growing outside her door. I parked on the street and, walking to her porch, felt the immediate effects of gastrointestinal Lepidoptera, more commonly known as butterflies in your stomach. Despite what I told my dear mother, this was a date, and I hadn’t been on a date in some time, which was reason enough for nerves. But this wasn’t just any date. This was a date with Becca Walsh, the girl who’d, since I met her half a lifetime ago, owned considerable real estate in my mind. My stomach churned accordingly.
After a deep breath, then six more, I knocked on the front door and heard footsteps, the turn of a lock, then saw Becca hopping on one foot while slipping a shoe onto the other. She wore a low-cut summer dress, and eventually my eyes drifted up to her smiling face, and she asked, “A tie, just for me?” before inviting me inside. “Make yourself at home,” she said, disappearing around the corner. “I need two minutes, maybe three.”
I snooped around Becca's living room while she finished doing whatever it is women do when they look ready to go but are apparently not. There were half a dozen paintings of London in her living room. One of Big Ben, another of Trafalgar Square, a big one of Tower Bridge over the couch adorned with Union Jack pillows. “You must love London,” I said to her through the wall.
She ducked her head out of the bathroom door and said, “I do. Every time T.J. Maxx has a sale on home goods, I can’t help myself.”
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” I asked, then added, “London,” in case she thought I was talking about T.J. Maxx.
“I’ve never been,” she said through the wall, “but God I want to.”
“We spent a few days there after our show at the Royal Albert Hall, but I never made it back.”
“I’m going one day,” Becca said, “maybe after I retire. You know I can retire from Rome in six years.”
“No you can’t. Wait, for real?”
“I’m forty, Marcus, and I started teaching at Rome when I was twenty-two. Six more years makes twenty-four, and I’ve banked enough sick leave to retire a year early.”
On a bookcase in the corner was a copy of our album on vinyl, and while I wondered if she’d set it out for me to see, I noticed her Rome yearbooks stacked neatly on the bottom shelf. I picked up the one from senior year—I never received my copy—and flipped through the pages until I found prom.
“Wait, the prom song was “Love Me Tomorrow” by Chicago? That song was old even then.”
Becca walked out of the bathroom, ready to leave. She was every bit as stunning as she was senior year, and I felt sorry for the pubescent boys in her class who were expected to focus on social studies in the presence of this woman.
“I know,” she said, holding up her hands to show her innocence. “It came down to either Chicago, or that Mazzy Star song, “Fade Into You.” Mazzy lost.”
I laughed and opened her door, and we stepped outside into the pink August sunset. As we walked under the oak toward my car, I asked, “Who’d you go to prom with senior year?” even though I thought I knew.
“Chase Malone,” she said. “No wait, that was the Christmas dance. Prom was Brent Holdbrooks.”
“You went to the Christmas dance with Chase Malone?” I asked. “The drum major?”
“Yeah,” Becca said as I opened the car door for her. “We started dating right after the state championship game. I think we actually broke up at the Christmas dance or maybe the next week. Gosh, it’s hard to remember.”
This was a lot to process in the time it took to walk around my car. The math didn’t add up, but maybe Becca remembered things wrong. I made a mental note to bring it up again, without being too weird about school dances two decades ago, and as I climbed into my car, I asked, “Does Trevi’s sound good?”
Trevi’s was a BBQ joint on the Coosa River, and along with Pantheon Pizza and the WigWam (a Native American themed burger joint that flew in the face of our town’s ancient Rome motif), was one of three restaurants in Rome without a drive-thru and playground. She said it sounded delicious, and twenty minutes later, after a waitress brought our fried pickle appetizer, Becca asked, “So, what’s it like sleeping in your old bedroom again?”
“Really weird,” I said. “Mom never changed a thing. Like, nothing. My Hakeem Olajuwon and Weezer posters are still on the walls, my Warren Moon toys are still on the dresser, my old acoustic guitar is in the corner right where I left it. I checked, just out of curiosity I promise, and even my Playboys were still under the mattress.”
Becca slapped my hand and said, “You left your Playboys? Wow, you really were in a hurry to get out of Rome.”
I smiled. “So what did people think when I left?”
“Rumor was your dad offered to pay for college and buy you a new truck.”
I shook my head. “No. He did pay for college. One year at least. But no new truck. Mom and I just had some drama ... so I moved back in with Dad.”
Becca flashed a sad smile and asked, “How is your mother?”
“Not great,” I said. “She still has her sense of humor, but her doctor doesn’t think she’ll make it to Christmas.”
“Oh, Marcus, I’m so sorry. She’s too young.”
“Thanks,” I said, and after we ordered our barbecue, I asked, “How are your parents?”
“Same as always,” Becca said. “My sister married a surgeon, and they’ve got a picket fence a
nd a minivan and three perfect kids, so by comparison, I’m just as big a failure as I’ve always been. But Mom did stop asking when I’d get remarried about five years ago, and we’ve actually gotten along better since then.”
Thanks to my mother, I knew Becca married a guy she met at Troy, and they moved to Huntsville after college. My mother also told me all the reasons she’d heard for their divorce five years later, but in the pantheon of Roman rumors, I ranked them all high in imagination and low in accuracy.
“How’d you never get married?” Becca asked after a moment.
“I thought I’d marry the girl I dated in college,” I lied, “but it all sort of fell apart.”
“The girl?” Becca asked. “The one that inspired it all?”
“Yeah,” I lied again.
“Where was she from?”
“Hell, I think.”
Becca laughed, and I said, “After her, things got weird. I can’t even remember my last real date before this.”
Becca frowned. “Wait, Marcus, did you think this was a real date?”
Evander Holyfield could not have punched me harder in the stomach, but before I could answer, Becca laughed and grabbed my hand and said, “This is my first date in a while too, Marcus. I’m glad it’s with you.”
Barbecue and second beers arrived, and I asked Becca what I’d missed in the last twenty years.
“Not much,” she said. “Coach P finally retired in 2010, and the team struggled and the town sort of lost its way for a while. Then Jackson moved back, and, well, it’s silly, an entire town getting so much of its identity from a game played by kids, but what else is there in Rome?”
“Do you ever talk to Jackson?”
I’m not sure why I asked this. I didn’t want to talk about Jackson, and if she did talk to him, I didn’t want to know.
“Rarely. He’s so busy. His oldest boy is in my class, so I see his wife a lot. They are such sweet people.”
“Deacon doesn’t seem to think much of him,” I said.
“Well,” Becca whispered, “Deacon is an asshole.”
I laughed and she said, “Seriously though, Deacon and Fletcher and all those guys, they’re pathetic. If they ran Jackson off and hired some loser who couldn’t win two games a year but let them watch practice, they’d think they’d done the town a service. You should stay as far away from those guys as you can. Their bitterness is contagious.”
After dinner, we sat on the boardwalk bench behind Trevi’s, watching pontoon boats float down the Coosa River. My phone buzzed with a text. It was from Rita and said, “Your mother wanted me to tell you she died and that she is leaving all her earthly belongings to someone named Traci.”
I laughed to myself and noticed Becca had left her hand on the bench between us. It took me a minute to read the sign and another five to convince the more apprehensive parts of my brain that it was a good idea, but eventually, I reached out and took her hand in mine.
“You know,” I said after a moment, “it’s really beautiful here. Why were we ever in such a hurry to leave?”
“Because hating your hometown is like teenage angst 101,” Becca said. “But it’s not a bad place. Better now that a certain someone came back.”
I smiled and squeezed her hand, then the speakers at Trevi’s back patio, which were always turned to 100.3 FM, ‘90s Hitz & More, played “Fade into You.” I stood up, held out my hand, and said, “Becca Walsh, will you go to prom with me?”
Becca took my hand, and we slow danced on the boardwalk, while above, enough people from Rome watched to assure we’d be the topic of Monday’s grapevine.
“People will talk,” I said, as Becca put her head on my shoulder and insisted on dancing to the Boyz II Men song that followed Mazzy Star.
“Let ’em,” she said, and we danced until the DJ played that weird Crash Test Dummies song and ruined the mood.
“Following the members of Dear Brutus around Manhattan the week of their network television debut, their camaraderie is apparent. But perhaps more obvious is that this is Marcus Brinks’s band. ‘Oh yeah, this is his thing,’ said drummer Porter Clayton. ‘All that pain was in Marcus’s head; we just helped him get it out.’”
—NME, “Masters of Their Fate,” February 15, 1998
Chapter Nine (1994)
Despite her promise, Becca didn’t talk to me the Monday after our night at Winona Falls. In Mr. Galba’s world history class, she strolled right past me in her sunflower babydoll dress, taking the seat behind her asshole boyfriend. The scene repeated itself on Tuesday, and Jackson, the only person I’d told about the previous Friday night, gave me knowing looks both times.
“I swear, we really hung out,” I said to him at lunch that day.
“I don’t care,” he said, channeling his best Tommy Lee Jones.
On Wednesday, Becca ignored me again, but Jackson didn’t take notice. No one took much notice of anything that day. The school buzzed with peculiar excitement. An unspoken anticipation, shared only by those with Y chromosomes, while the girls of Rome looked on with open disgust.
During homeroom, I asked Jackson what was going on, and his eyes widened, and he shook his head to discourage any follow-ups. I wasn’t about to ask some random jock for fear of them stuffing me into a locker. And I couldn’t ask some random girl that day either, for fear of the same. But I cornered Jackson after homeroom, and he whispered, “Dude, just meet me at my truck after school.”
~ ~ ~
“Now can you tell me what the hell is going on?” I asked Jackson as we drove into Riverton, blasting Oasis through speakers that rattled your fillings.
“Nope,” he shouted and turned the music up even louder, “you’ll see soon enough.”
I’d never seen Main Street during the day when the shops were open, and Jackson parked in front of a place called Alverson’s Sundries.
“What are sundries?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Jackson said, “but you need to stay in the truck. It’ll look suspicious if we go in together.”
“Wait, are you about to rob Alverson of his sundries? Jackson, I don’t want any part of this.”
“Just stay in the truck,” Jackson repeated and ducked into the store.
While waiting outside, I saw two guys I recognized from school walk inside and another walk out holding a brown paper sack. Minutes later, Jackson jumped into the truck and tossed his own brown paper sack into my lap.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Sundries,” Jackson said. “Open it.”
Jackson backed out of his parking space, letting another car full of guys from Rome pull in, and I opened the sack, pulling out a glossy magazine with a Tanqueray Gin advertisement on the back. I flipped the magazine over, and on the cover smiled a topless woman, boobs in hands, with bunny ears atop her bleached blonde head.
“Playboy?” I asked.
“Yes!” Jackson said, with an enthusiasm he typically reserved for describing his interception against Pinkerton.
“You’re joking, right?” I asked, holding up the magazine then quickly putting it down because the woman in the car next to us at the red light noticed and shook her head disapprovingly. “This is what everyone was so weird about today?” I asked. “A Playboy? Jackson, I’ve got three issues of Playboy at home.” In fact, everyone I knew had at least three issues of Playboy at home, hidden under a mattress, or at the bottom of a box of baseball cards, or buried in the backyard if their mothers were particularly nosy. Some guys stole them from their father’s closet, others had older brothers, who charged interest rates similar to those of banks in third-world countries, make their purchases, and some guys randomly stumbled over discarded issues in the woods, like smut grew on vines in the wild. But most towns had a store whose proprietor played fast and loose with local minimum age of purchase and possession laws, and young men with wispy mustaches could purchase copies for themselves. Alverson’s Sundries was apparently that store in Riverton.
“Freaking ou
t over a damn Playboy,” I said. “If I’d known everyone in Rome was so repressed, I’d have shared my copies with you. You guys do know channel 99 sometimes shows scrambled boobs, don’t you?”
“It’s not just any Playboy, dick-ear,” Jackson said, pointing at the cover. “Look.”
I looked, and next to the boob-holding rabbit-eared woman were the words, “Girls of the SEC.”
Jackson stopped in the back of the Walmart parking lot and grabbed the magazine from me. He flipped through the pages like a speed-reader, and as I watched the blur of skin and advertisements go by, he mumbled to himself, “Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Kentucky, there! Mississippi State!” Jackson held the magazine for me to see, and there, wearing a pair of maroon Mississippi State socks and nothing else, was a pretty blonde studying in the library.
“Don’t you worry,” I asked, “that this is going to warp your sense of the female form ... and college libraries?”
Jackson shook his head in disappointment and held the magazine where I could no longer see it.
“What?” I asked. “I mean, she’s hot and she’s naked, and that’s great and all, but like I told you, I’ve got three copies of Playboy at home.”
“She,” Jackson said, holding up the magazine again and pointing to the girl in socks, “went to Rome.”
“Wait, for real?”
“Yeah, for real. Her name is Tiffany Thompson. She was a senior when we were freshmen, and now she’s a junior at Mississippi State.”
“And now she’s naked,” I said, finally understanding the day’s unspoken excitement.
“And now she’s naked,” Jackson repeated, looking at the picture again.
“Wait, how’d everyone know she’d be in this issue?”
You’ve got to remember this was the early days of the internet—AOL had only just begun sending free trial CDs in the mail. I’m not sure how anyone found out about anything in those days, and Jackson didn’t seem like the sort of guy who’d have insight into the underground pornography pipeline, but perhaps I had him all wrong.
“Her sister Tabatha is a sophomore,” Jackson said, “and Tiffany told her, and she told some people, and now everyone knows.”
The Rome of Fall Page 7