“This is Marcus Brinks. He was in the band Dear Brutus,” Becca said, and Fletcher’s mother said she’d never heard of me.
“That happens a lot,” I said to Becca after Fletcher’s mother walked away.
“Marcus?” a voice said from behind, and I turned around to see a pretty blonde I didn’t know.
“Yes,” I said, and Becca grabbed my hand.
“I’m Amy Crowder, Jackson’s wife.”
“Oh, hi,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too,” she said, smiling. “Jackson wanted to talk to you, but he’ll be shaking hands for half an hour. So he wanted me to ask if you’d like to have dinner with us on Sunday night. It’s the one night I won’t let him study film.”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” I said, though there weren’t many things I’d rather not do.
“Great,” she said, “we live at 2226 Amherst, in Coach Pumphrey’s old house. Does seven o’clock work?”
“Uh, sure.”
“We’ll see you then,” she said. “I know Jackson is excited.”
~ ~ ~
“Please come with me Sunday,” I said to Becca later that evening on her front porch swing.
“I don’t think I’m invited,” she said. “Besides, I teach their son, and he’s not doing well. It would be awkward.”
“That’s no excuse,” I said. “It’s already going to be awkward.”
“What makes you say that? You and Jackson were best friends.”
“We were only friends because Rome is so small. If we’d gone to a bigger school, we’d have been friends with people we actually liked instead.”
“I don’t buy that for one second,” Becca said. “Now tell me what happened between you two.”
“He ... nothing. He wouldn’t even know he did something to upset me.”
“Oh my god,” Becca said. “So you’ve just held a grudge for twenty-three years. You’re such a guy.”
I laughed. “I guess, but even so, he’s so full of shit now.”
Becca stared at me for a moment before asking, “How so?”
“You heard him tonight? All that, ‘Jesus kept me away from porn’ crap. I was here for what, four months, and all he ever wanted to do was look at porn. I went with him to Alverson’s once a month to buy the new Playboy. And for him to say Jesus kept him away from alcohol? That’s such bullshit. I once saw him so drunk he pissed on my neighbor’s Dachshund. He only said that crap tonight because it’s what the people in this town want to hear, you know?”
Becca had let go of my hand by now, and she was silent for a long time then said, “What I know is you’ve been away a long time, and people can change a lot in two decades, and I don’t want to be judged on the things I did when I was seventeen. And I suppose you don’t either, Marcus. Am I right?”
I sighed and said, “You’re right.”
“Of course I am,” Becca said, then she kissed me on the head and said goodnight.
“The son of divorced parents, you could easily mistake Marcus Brinks for just some guy in your freshman history class. He’s affable and a bit shy, yet when asked about his lyrics, particularly allusions to Lois Lowry’s YA novel The Giver, in songs like “Without Colour, Pain, or Past, Pt. 1,” or “My Fiona,” a song rumored to be about the girl who broke his heart freshman year of college, Brinks grows frustrated. ‘Look, my job is to write this shit and sing it, not explain it to you.’”
—Blender, “Et tu, Brute?” May 28, 1998
Chapter Eleven (1994)
Friday marked the one-week anniversary of my faux date with Becca, and one week since she’d spoken to me. Not a hi, or a hello, or a how are you as we passed in the hall. Not a wink, or a smile, or even a subtle nod when she walked by my desk. Inside the halls of Rome High School, Becca gave no indication we’d spent what I thought was a lovely evening at Winona Falls or that she even remembered my name. And maybe we hadn’t, and maybe she didn’t. I occasionally took Albuterol for my asthma, and in rare instances, it can cause vivid dreams. Of course, Silas and Jackson didn’t believe me and gave me hell every time Becca walked by without acknowledging my existence, though never within earshot of anyone else, because we all knew, if Deacon found out I’d even dreamed I hung out with Becca, he’d kill me, and Silas and Jackson would likely receive supplemental ass whippings just for being my friend.
“The lead singer is this big dude with crazy sideburns, and he always wears a vest full of harmonicas and, like, a fedora or something.” Jackson was telling me about Blues Traveler, a band his sister Julia introduced him to over the weekend, while we waited on Mr. Galba’s world history class to begin.
“Does the album have explicit lyrics?” I asked. “Because if it does, can you just give it to me before Brother Shawn makes you burn it?”
Jackson flipped his middle finger my way, then his eyes widened, and I felt the slightest brush on my shoulder as Becca Walsh dropped a note on my desk.
I looked at the folded paper then at Jackson, who motioned for me to open it, but Deacon walked in, so I closed my fist around the paper until he’d passed. Once Deacon made his way to the back of the room, I unfolded the note, and on the center of the page, in curly cursive, Becca wrote, ‘Stay in your desk after class.’ Against my better judgment, I glanced back at Becca, but she was talking to Deacon and took no notice, so I refolded the note and said to Jackson, “I need to stay here for a few minutes after class.” He nodded conspiratorially, and after what had to be the longest hour of my life, the bell rang and everyone packed their books and began to leave. Jackson took his time until I glared at him and he hurried along, and then Deacon and Becca left together, and I wondered if this was a prank to see how long I’d sit there waiting. But a minute later, Becca ducked back into the room and smiled.
I stood to meet her, and after she looked behind her to make sure we were alone, she asked, “Can you tell your mom you’re going to the game tonight and that you’re spending the night with Silas afterward?”
“Uh ... yeah. I’ll need to check with Silas and make sure it’s okay with his—”
“No, you don’t. Just tell your mom where you’ll be and meet me in the mall parking lot at 4:30 outside the food court.”
“Yeah, I can do that,” I said, because there was nothing she could ask of me that I wouldn’t say yes to.
“See you then, FNB,” she said and kissed two fingers before touching them to my cheek and walking away. But then she stopped in the doorway, turned around, and whispered, “Oh, and Marcus, bring all the money you can get your hands on.”
~ ~ ~
Becca was ten minutes late to the mall, which gave me ten minutes to invent nightmare scenarios to explain her mysterious invitation, most involving Deacon Cassburn et al. jumping me, taking all the money I could get my hands on to buy themselves a keg, and tossing my broken body into the lake behind the mall. But Deacon was at the school with the rest of his team, waiting to board the bus that would carry them to destroy another hapless foe, this week the Wilson High Wildcats.
“You know,” Jackson said to me at lunch, after I told him about the note and mysterious rendezvous, “if Deacon does murder you, that should be enough to get him kicked off the team.” I laughed then, but here, alone in the mall parking lot, it didn’t seem as funny.
“Shit!” I yelled when Becca appeared out of nowhere and knocked on my window.
“Are you okay?” she asked when I opened my door.
“I thought you were your boyfriend,” I said.
“Ooo-kay,” she said. “Well, sorry I’m late. Saved by the Bell was on. So how much money did you bring?”
“I had sixty bucks saved and found another twenty in my mom’s purse.”
“It’ll have to do,” she said. “Do you have any gas?”
“Uh ... no.”
“We’ll take my car then,” she said, grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me from my car, “but you’re driving.”
Becca and I climbed into her Saturn, and I shift
ed into reverse and asked, “Wait, where are we going?”
“Atlanta.”
I put the car back in park.
“The one in Georgia? Just the two of us? We can’t do that. Can we?”
Becca looked around the parking lot and said, “I don’t see anyone here to stop us.”
“But my mom—”
“Will never know. And neither will my parents. Or anyone else.”
“Okay,” I said, “but you’ve at least got to tell me why we’re going to Atlanta.”
Becca smiled and said, “We’re going to see Weezer.”
Weezer was in the middle of their first headlining tour. They’d played The Nick in Birmingham the night before, the concert Jackson suggested we go to on my first day at Rome, and it crushed me they were only an hour from my house and there was no way my mom would even consider letting me go see them. I knew they had a show in Atlanta tonight, at a place called The Point—they were my favorite band, I knew pretty much everything about them. But not once after Becca asked me to meet her at the mall did I allow myself to dream the hottest girl in school wanted to take me to see my favorite band. Some things are too absurd even to dream about.
I smiled back and said, “Okay, yeah, we’re going to see Weezer. But wait, do you know how to get there?”
MapQuest wouldn’t be a thing for another two years. Google Maps another nine. I don’t know how anyone got anywhere back then.
“I called The Point,” Becca said, then reading from a slip of paper said, “It’s on 420 Moreland Avenue NE.”
“Okay, but I still don’t know where that is. I don’t know where anything in Atlanta is.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Becca said. “When we get to Atlanta, we’ll stop at a gas station and ask for directions.”
This was a terrible idea, but I wasn’t not going to go just because we didn’t know where we were going, so we left the mall and headed east, singing along to the Blue Album at full volume.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you as a Weezer fan,” I said somewhere near the state line.
“And why not?” Becca asked.
“Because it’s like nerd rock,” I said, “and you’re not particularly nerdy.”
“I’m the nerdiest person you know,” Becca said.
“You date the quarterback. You’re practically a cheerleader.”
Becca flipped me double birds, and I said, “Okay, since you’re so nerdy, what’s your favorite book?”
“The Giver,” she said, “have you read it?”
I said no and she said, “Well, it’s dystopian and totally nerdy. My copy is in the back seat. You can borrow it.”
“Fine, but naming a nerdy book is easy. What’s your favorite Star Wars action figure?”
“Hammerhead,” Becca said, without hesitation.
“Shit. I stand corrected,” I said, and she gave me one of those winks usually reserved for Deacon. I almost wrecked.
We lost an hour crossing time zones and arrived on the outskirts of Atlanta around seven. By then, the interstate had mutated from four lanes to eight, and I was more than happy to exit and ask for directions, if for no other reason than to let my hands stop shaking. We stopped at a Chevron with bars on the window, and the man behind the counter, who was likely still cashing royalty checks from his role in Deliverance, shook his head no when Becca asked if he knew how to get to a placed called The Point.
“It’s on Moreland Avenue,” I said, and the man glared at me and asked, “You gonna buy something or not?”
Becca placed a pack of gum and a dollar bill on the counter, and after he tossed her change into his tip jar, the man said, “Stay on twenty. You’ll see an exit for Moreland in five or six miles.”
Out of curiosity, I mapped this the other day, and in theory, we could have driven from Riverton to The Point in no more than four turns, but in reality, it took significantly more, including one U-turn of debatable legality. And this was just to find Moreland Avenue. We needed to ask directions twice more to find the club, which was in a part of town called Little Five Points. We finally made it though, sometime after nine, and parked between a vegetarian restaurant and a liquor store.
“How much do I owe you for our tickets?” I asked Becca as we walked down the sidewalk toward The Point.
“It’s a free show,” she said. “You just need a 99X Freeloader card to get in.”
“Oh, that’s awesome,” I said, as we joined the back of the line outside The Point. “Where’d you get those?”
She didn’t respond, and after a while, I said, “Because they’re going to want us to have one.” Then noticing the “No persons under 21 allowed” sign, I added, “And they’re going to want us to be four years older.”
The line crept forward toward the three-hundred-pound man checking IDs and, I suppose, breaking the necks of anyone without one, and Becca said, “Give me your money. I’ve got this figured out.” I handed her my eighty dollars, and she combined it with whatever cash she brought before counting out fifty bucks and pocketing the rest. My heart pounded as the line inched toward the man who would soon kill us, and I whispered, “This is dumb. Let’s just go back home. I don’t want to get into trouble.”
“Marcus, shut up,” Becca said, so I did, and when we reached the door, she tucked fifty dollars into the bouncer’s front pocket. He looked us over, then the slightest trace of a smile flashed across his face.
~ ~ ~
Weezer opened with “No One Else” and played every song off the Blue Album, except “My Name is Jonas.” They even played three songs from their unreleased second album, closing the show with “Only in Dreams” and “Tired of Sex.” Jake Dawson, in his Atlanta Music Monthly review said, “Rivers Cuomo and pals treated fans to ninety minutes of geeky teenage insecurity wrapped in face-melting guitar riffs that no one in attendance will ever forget.”
I know this because the setlist for every single Weezer concert is available online, along with the archives of Atlanta Music Monthly, a newspaper that went under in 2003. I do not know it from experience because the bouncer, after pocketing our fifty dollars, kicked us out of the line and threatened to have us arrested for bribing an officer of the law, which in retrospect, I don’t believe he was, but we were seventeen and easily scared.
Defeated, we sulked back to Becca’s car and saw three tow trucks clearing out the lot between the vegetarian restaurant and the liquor store. One of the tow trucks was backing up to Becca’s Saturn, and we took off running and shouting and jumped in the car just before they attached the hook or whatever it is tow trucks use. The driver climbed out from his cab and shouted something at us, but I floored it, and we squealed out of the parking lot, smashing through a small row of shrubs and onto Moreland Avenue, hearts racing, and laughing hysterically.
“I’m sorry I lost our money,” Becca said an hour later, as we drowned our sorrows in chili dogs from The Varsity.
“It’s okay,” I said between bites. “All things considered, it’s been a fun evening.”
“It has been fun, FNB.”
I took a sip of my milkshake and asked, “So why didn’t you talk to me all week?”
“Why do you think?” Becca asked.
“Deacon?”
Becca nodded. “Last year, he wanted to fight my cousin Doug after he saw us talking in the lunchroom. If we didn’t have the same last name, I think Deacon would have killed him.”
“Oh great,” I said, and Becca reached across the table, squeezed my hand, and said, “I’m not going to tell him about this. I’m not going to tell anyone. So if you don’t either, Deacon will never know.”
We made it back to Rome around three in the morning, and that’s when I noticed a gaping hole in Becca’s plan, namely that it was three in the morning and we had nowhere to go.
“I’ve prepared for this,” Becca said, and I followed her directions to the park at the top of Oppian Road. We parked and Becca pulled a blanket from her trunk and set it under a tree. From the park,
we had a spectacular view of Rome. Well, spectacular is a stretch, but it was a nice view, and I said, “I wonder if the team won.”
“I don’t,” Becca said.
“Yeah, me neither,” I said, and she laughed.
We laid back and looked up at the stars, and after a while, Becca asked, “Have you heard of Big Star?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“They’re old,” she said, “but you’d like them. I accidentally ordered their album from Columbia House in one of those eight-CDs-for-a-penny deals, but it’s amazing.”
She pulled out her Discman and introduced me to Big Star’s #1 Record through shared headphones.
“I’ve decided,” Becca said after we listened to “Thirteen,” the song she called her favorite in the whole wide world, “I’m dumping him next week.”
I sat up and said, “No shit? Why?”
“Because there are a lot better guys out there than Deacon,” Becca said.
She was about as subtle as Marshall Ford speaking at a pep rally, but if she wanted me to kiss her, and looking back she totally wanted me to kiss her, I didn’t take the hint. Or maybe I took it but didn’t think it worth the risk of Deacon Cassburn retroactively kicking my ass, pending breakup or not. So, I just laid back down next to her and said, “Yeah, there are a lot better guys out there,” and Becca scooted close and put her head on my shoulder.
We slept that way until sunrise.
Chapter Twelve (2017)
In the mid-1980s, when Coach Pumphrey built his house on the Coosa River, it was the only house in Palatine Bend. An oasis from the stresses of coaching a small Alabama high school football team. Now double-mortgaged McMansions cover the area, many built on swampland kids from Rome used to ride four-wheelers through. I stood on Jackson’s porch and looked out on a sea of Honda Odysseys and adjustable height basketball goals, imagining them under murky brown water the next time the river left its banks, then I rang the bell.
Becca advised me not to bring a bottle of wine, because Amy Crowder was, as she put it, “Jesus’s second cousin or something.” I argued that Jesus turned water into wine, but Becca said, “Not in Amy Crowder’s house,” so I waited at the door empty-handed.
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