A boy who looked remarkably like Jackson the day I first met him answered the door, and he stared at me for a moment before shouting, “Mom, Dad, some man is at the door.”
Amy Crowder appeared in the foyer and said, “J. J., this is our guest, Mr. Brinks. Say hello.”
“Hello, Mr. Brinks,” J. J. said.
“Hello, J. J.,” I replied.
“Some man is at the door,” Amy repeated and laughed. “My apologies for our less than welcoming welcome committee. We’re glad you could make it, Marcus. How are you?”
“Good,” I said, stepping inside. “Thanks again for having me.”
“Of course. Jackson is out back grilling steaks. J. J., show Mr. Brinks outside while I finish up in the kitchen.”
I followed the boy through the living room and onto the stone deck, where water flowed from an elevated hot tub into a custom pool. Below us, an immaculate lawn sloped toward the Coosa River and a boathouse where Jackson’s boat lived in luxury. Jackson stood in the corner, facing the river, next to his Big Green Egg, and J. J. said, “Hey Dad, your friend is here.”
Jackson turned around and said, “Brinks! My man. Come here.” We met halfway, and Jackson gave me one of those firm handshakes that morph into a half-hug with three or four fist pounds to the back, then he stepped away and said, “Brinks, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“You either,” I said, “except, you’re all ripped.”
“It’s one of the perks of having a weight room outside your office.”
He looked at me again and shook his head. “My God. I remember watching you on MTV back in college. Y’all had that video where you were making out with the girl from Dawson’s Creek.”
“Yeah, but she hated me. That wasn’t nearly as fun as it looked.”
Jackson shook his head. “That was wild. We were all like, ‘How the hell did someone from Rome end up on MTV?’” Jackson flinched after saying “hell” then said to J. J., “Son, don’t tell your mama,” but the boy never looked up from his phone.
“What a dream though,” Jackson said to me. “Make millions and spend the rest of your life in the Caribbean, living off royalties.”
I shrugged. “That’s not exactly—”
“I get it,” Jackson said, “but I don’t think I could do it, you know? Just lying in a hammock sipping fruity drinks all day. I’d be bored after a week.”
“Well, I fish a lot, and sometimes I—”
“You know I worked in Manhattan for a while, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I heard.”
That Jackson gave up a lucrative position with a New York City investment bank to coach high school football in Alabama was considered, in Rome at least, a sacrifice on par with Abraham and Isaac.
“Miserable city. I hated it, Amy hated it, and I burned out pretty quick. But God, I’d already made more money than our great-grandchildren will ever spend. I suppose I could have bought an island then and lived the rest of my life in a hammock, but I’m like a shark. I’ve got to keep moving or I’ll die. So I took some time off and realized what I missed most was football. I knew Rome had fallen on hard times, so I called up Principal Trajan and told him I wanted to come back as head coach.”
“Well, I know everyone is happy to have you back in Rome,” I lied.
“Most everyone,” Jackson said. “But I learned a long time ago you can’t please everyone. How do you like your steak, Brinks?”
I told him medium rare, and after a few minutes of Jackson extolling the grilling prowess of his Big Green Egg, he put the steaks on a plate, and I followed him inside. “Have a seat,” he said, motioning toward the den, and I sat on the big leather sectional with J. J., leaving the La-Z-Boy for Jackson.
“Did you watch much football in Jamaica?” Jackson asked when he returned to the den. The Cowboys and Giants were playing on NBC, and I said, “Not much. I think Flow TV had an NFL package, but I didn’t pay for it. Jamaicans are more into track, and cricket, and soccer.”
“I love the Premier League,” J. J. said.
“No you don’t,” Jackson scolded. “Now go wash up, and tell your sister it’s time to eat.”
J. J. ran upstairs, and I followed Jackson into the dining room, which had a panoramic view of the river. “Your home is beautiful,” I said to Amy, as she set dish after dish on the table.
Amy thanked me, and Jackson said, “It ought to be after all the money we’ve spent on it.”
Jackson’s self-aggrandizement was tolerable when we were kids. That he thought so much of his lowly spot on the Rome depth chart, or the used truck his parents had probably bought for five hundred dollars, or that Maggie Duncan had let him get to second base once in ninth grade was somehow endearing. Back then, when Jackson would start to gloat, Silas and I would always exchange a quick smile and just tune him out. But now that Jackson was truly wealthy and successful, I found his boasts particularly grating.
“Never renovate an old home,” he continued. “We’d been better off knocking this one to the ground and starting over. I’m not sure what Coach P was thinking when he built this place. The kitchen, the bathrooms, we had to redo them all to get them up to our standards.”
“Hi, I’m Madison, and I’m eight,” said a little girl I hadn’t noticed standing next to me. She extended her hand, so I shook it and said, “Hi Madison, I’m Marcus, and I’m forty.”
“I know. My mother said you are lost, and we should pray for you.”
“Madison,” Jackson said with wide eyes, but I laughed and waved him off. “I am a little lost,” I said. “So, thank you.”
Jackson shook his head, and Madison and J. J. took their seats as their mother brought out the last plate of food. We passed around mashed potatoes and gravy, fried okra, green beans, and cornbread, and just as I shoveled the first forkful into my mouth, Amy said, “Madison, will you please say grace?”
The Crowders extended their hands; I held Jackson’s and Madison’s, and as we all bowed our heads, I quickly swallowed my potatoes. “God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for our food,” Madison prayed, and though I wanted to point out that good and food do not rhyme, I said amen instead.
We dug in, and when my mouth was full of okra, Madison said, “My mother said you were exclusive.”
“Madison!” Jackson and Amy said in unison.
I swallowed a laugh and said, “Exclusive?”
“I’m sorry,” Amy said. “I told her you were reclusive.”
I laughed again and said, “I was reclusive, Madison, but not anymore.”
“What does that even mean?” Madison asked.
“It means I was famous but didn’t want to be.”
“Were you as famous as my daddy?”
“Not even close,” I said, and the little girl beamed. “I’m not even famous enough to be a recluse anymore. If anything, I’d be a hermit.”
“We have a hermit crab at school,” Madison said, and I smiled.
“Marcus,” Amy asked, as I cut into my steak, “did you attend church often in Jamaica?”
“Not often,” I said. “I dated a Rastafarian woman, and she used to take me with her to church, but it was just a bunch of people smoking pot and chanting over bongo drums in the community center.” None of this was true, but Amy already thought I was lost, so why not exaggerate my depravity?
“Oh,” Amy said, frowning at either the mention of dating or smoking pot or bongo drums, I wasn’t sure which. I took a bite of my steak, which, thanks to Jackson’s less than deft touch with the grill, looked like it had reentered Earth’s atmosphere at 28,000 miles per hour, and Amy asked, “Do Rastafarians believe in Jesus?”
“Oh sure,” I said, swallowing my steak with considerable effort. “They believe he was a black African and that he was emperor of Ethiopia for most of the last century, but they believe in him.”
“My mother said you were in a band,” Madison said.
“Yes, I was in a band,” I said, happy to change the subject, “a long time
ago.”
“Can I listen to your songs?”
“No,” I said, “probably not.”
“Why? Are they about Harry Potter?”
I laughed then realized I shouldn’t have and said, “No, no wizards.”
I took another bite of steak, and while Madison waited for me to chew it, she asked her mother, “Have you heard Mr. Brinks’s songs?”
“A long time ago,” Amy said. “I remember one of the videos being particularly gratuitous.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with the videos,” I mumbled through a full mouth, but I’m not sure Amy Crowder believed me.
~ ~ ~
After dinner, Jackson and I walked to his boathouse, which had a second story that served as his man cave. There was comfortable leather seating for six, but the walls were bare apart from a seventy-inch television, and I suspected Jackson rarely brought people up here, if ever. “Is this where you watch film?” I asked, pointing at the television.
“This is where I get away from watching film,” Jackson said then added, “and everything else.”
He opened the fridge in the corner of the room, and after moving some boxes around, pulled out two Heinekens. “Amy doesn’t approve of having alcohol in the house with kids around,” Jackson said, handing me one of the beers.
“It’s nice you have this place then,” I said, taking the beer.
“She doesn’t approve of alcohol in here either, but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Cheers.”
We walked out onto the balcony, and I sat in one of the rocking chairs and looked out on the river while Jackson turned on some music. The drum intro of Oasis’s “Live Forever” came through the speakers as Jackson sat next to me and said, “Amy doesn’t care for secular music either, so I have to listen to this out here. Man, I loved this album.”
I looked at Jackson tapping his state championship ring to the beat and smiled. He was different up here. He was the old Jackson, not a colossus straddling the world, but a man so scared of his wife he hides his beer and music.
“Didn’t you hate Oasis?” he asked.
“No, I liked them,” I said. “Not as much as you, but I liked them.”
“I saw them in college,” Jackson said. “In Atlanta, with Amy actually. She wasn’t always so ...”
“Religious?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. “I mean, we’re all Christian around here, but she’s drifting toward the fringes. Last year, she got really into Levitical law, all that ‘if a man eats an ostrich, the community must stone him to death’ stuff. Dream interpretation is her latest thing, and she’s freaked out because one night she dreamt blood was pouring from my statue at the Colosseum.”
“That is kind of freaky,” I said.
“I suppose it is,” Jackson said, then he looked me over and shook his head and said, “Marcus Brinks, I never thought I’d see you in Rome again. Would you have ever come back if your mama hadn’t got sick?”
“No,” I said. “I’d settled into a pretty deep rut. But maybe things happen for a reason. I’ve had a couple dates with Becca Walsh.”
Jackson stared at me for a long second and said, “Becca Walsh...I forgot how obsessed you were with her when you first moved here.”
“I was not, but I—”
“You were too. But good for you, Brinks. After all this time, you finally asked her out. Becca is a sweet girl. J. J. adores her. So do you think anything might come of these dates? Are you back in Rome permanently?”
“I don’t know. I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind. We’re both forty and single, but I ...”
“Don’t want to scare her off?”
“Yeah. I mean we’ve only had three dates, and one was to hear you speak.”
Jackson shook his head. “Shawn has begged me to do that since we moved back. I finally ran out of excuses.”
“You were good,” I said. “You should’ve been a preacher.”
“Shit,” Jackson said, and I laughed.
We were quiet for a moment, and I said, “Thanks for having me over.”
Jackson waved me off, and I said, “No seriously, I’ve only seen you from a distance since I got back, and you’re larger than life around here. I didn’t know if I’d be able to talk to you anymore.”
“It’s all an act, Brinks. The spectacle gets us more press, and more families move to Rome, and more kids play football. It’s just part of the game now, but I don’t think the Quarterback Club realizes it.”
“I’ve gathered they’re not your biggest fans,” I said.
“You, my friend, are a master of understatement. I’m not scared of those guys though. They’re dumber now than they were in high school. But if one of them did scare me, it’s Deacon. He’s not a happy person, Brinks. I don’t think he watches TV or listens to music or anything. He just sits and thinks of ways to bring me down, and guys like that are dangerous. I wish he were fat and stupid like the rest of them, but even so, he doesn’t scare me. That bunch, they’ll get on board when we win state, and even if they don’t, no one will care what they say anyway.”
“It’s funny, they probably thought they’d be running this town forever. If we hadn’t—”
Jackson grabbed my shoulder and said, “Brinks, we don’t talk about that. Ever.”
He was different again, scary almost, and I said, “Yeah, that’s cool.”
He let go of my shoulder and said, “You’re right, though. I doubt in high school those miserable bastards ever envisioned the ebb and flow of life placing me on such a high tide. It’s my time now, Brinks, and I plan to take full advantage of it.”
We finished our beers, and Jackson tossed them in a garbage bag then put that bag under some other bags in the can so his wife would never see. It was pathetic and endearing all at once because, beneath all the swagger and bravado, he was still the same guy who asked if I liked Weezer on my first day at Rome. I didn’t like him necessarily; we’d grown too far apart to be friends again, but I liked his family, well, his kids at least. And I had no desire to hurt them just so Deacon Cassburn could watch practice again.
“Come see me in the field house during your off period one day,” Jackson said as I climbed into my car. “Our snack machine has twice the selection of the teacher’s lounge.”
I told him I would then stopped by Becca’s on the way home to tell her she was right.
“Dear Brutus lead singer Marcus Brinks abruptly walked off stage last night, halfway through his band’s set before a sellout crowd at Amsterdam Arena. Citing both mental and physical exhaustion, keyboardist Piper Van Pelt told reporters, ‘Marcus received an IV at the hospital last night and is feeling much better. Of course he feels like s— for letting down the fans, and we’re working to schedule a makeup show as soon as possible.’”
—The Guardian, October 3, 1998
Chapter Thirteen (1994)
The night after Becca and I drove to Atlanta, didn’t see Weezer, and slept in a park, Riverton closed Main Street for good. There was no formal announcement. No ceremonial last night of low-speed flirting. When legions of teens descended upon downtown Riverton Saturday night, they encountered half a dozen police checkpoints, and the sad realization that one of the few fun things to do in town had died with a whimper.
“Each time you passed the checkpoint, a cop recorded your tag number,” Jackson told me in homeroom on Monday, “and if you passed by three times in one night, they wrote you a ticket.”
“They can do that?”
“They’re the cops; they can do anything.”
“Shit. Did you get a ticket?” I asked him.
“No, but a few people did, and after that, everyone left. A truck full of guys told us everyone was going to cruise the Walmart parking lot, but when Silas and I got there, it was just those dudes, so we played Sega in his garage the rest of the night.”
I suspect this theory might not stand up to intense historical analysis, but I’ll always believe a bored Riverton teen drov
e home and invented meth that night.
~ ~ ~
A week of school came and went, and by now, I knew better than to expect even the slightest acknowledgment from Becca, which was good because, as usual, she ignored me completely. With Main Street closed and nothing promising on the horizon for Saturday night fun, I went to the football game on Friday night. Rome played J. P. Hornby, and won, by Rome standards, a close game, 35-14. I sat with Silas and listened with disinterest as he explained the superiority of the no-huddle offense and why Eazy-E was a punk-ass bitch. And late in the fourth quarter, when I assumed she’d forgotten about me, Becca came and sat between us.
“Did my Friday Night Boyfriend tell you what we did last weekend?” Becca asked Silas.
“No, he did not,” Silas said.
“That’s because he is a gentleman,” Becca said.
“Wait, did you two go to Vegas?” Silas asked. “Are you secretly married? Congratulations! I wish I’d known. I’d have sent a gift.”
Becca laughed and, much to my horror, said, “No, we drove to Atlanta and tried to sneak into a Weezer concert then spent the night together in Oppian Park.”
This time Silas laughed, I guess because he thought Becca was joking in an oddly specific way, but when neither Becca nor I laughed with him, he asked, “Wait, did you really?”
“Yeah,” I said then added, “but I didn’t think we were telling anyone about it.”
“Silas isn’t just anyone,” Becca said and pinched his cheek. Then she tousled my hair and stood and said, “All right, FNB, I’ll see you next week.” But before she left, Becca turned around and asked, “Did you hear about the party?”
Silas said he had, and Becca said maybe she’d see us there, and when she was gone, he looked at me with wide eyes and said, “Brinks, holy hell man, are you trying to get yourself killed?”
My heart was racing now, because if Becca told Silas, there was no telling who else she’d told, and in a school the size of Rome, it was only a matter of time until Deacon Cassburn heard and broke me into a thousand little pieces.
The Rome of Fall Page 10