The Rome of Fall

by Chad Alan Gibbs

  “Well, he’s an American citizen,” Jackson said, “so I’m not sure if—”

  “We’re taking him down,” I said. “And I think I have a plan.

  ACT III

  Chapter Eighteen (2017)

  “As you can see, Brutus is torn. Caesar is his friend. He loves Caesar. But he also loves Rome and cannot stand by while any man, even his best friend, rises in power and becomes a dictator. So, Brutus and his fellow conspirators form a boy band, and they churn out hit song after hit song, until Cassius Longinus leaves the group to pursue a solo career.”

  I’d say stuff like this on occasion, when I felt like my classroom wasn’t paying attention, just to see if anyone would notice. They never did, although the kid wearing glasses who sat by the wall once answered the test question, “What three-word phrase is Julius Caesar most famous for?” with “Pimpin’ ain’t easy.” In the end, I had to give him credit, since technically, I’d said this in class when I thought no one was listening.

  “Brutus’s bandmates used his love of country to their advantage,” I continued. “They played on his honor and convinced him Caesar’s death would benefit Rome. That, in the end, is why Brutus joined the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said the mousy-looking girl on the front row.

  “Well, they didn’t really form a boy band, I was just—”

  “No, it doesn’t make sense that he would stab his best friend because he thought that was best for Rome.”

  I left my chair to sit on my desk and asked, “Why doesn’t that make sense?”

  The girl shrugged, because any time an actual classroom conversation was about to take place, my students reversed course and stared at me like I was an idiot.

  “Okay,” I said, “So Brutus—”

  “She’s right,” said the curly-haired girl by the door. “Think about it. All these dudes, these senators and whatnot, why would they care if Caesar becomes king? They’re all his friends, right? It’s not like, if he becomes king, their lives will be worse. They’d be best friends with the freaking king. Who wouldn’t want that?”

  “So you think dictators are cool as long as you’re friends with them?” asked the short blonde by the air conditioner.

  “No,” said the curly-haired girl by the door. “I’m just saying these guys didn’t kill Caesar out of goodwill for their common man. They hated their common man. Look at how they talked to those carpenters and cobblers in the opening scene.”

  “Okay,” I said, “then why do we think the conspirators wanted to kill Caesar?”

  “Power,” said the curly-haired girl by the door. “They didn’t so much hate the idea of someone being dictator as they hated the idea of that someone not being them.”

  “But Brutus didn’t want to be dictator,” the mousy-looking girl up front said.

  “Of course he did,” said the curly-haired girl by the door. “He stabbed his best friend.”

  “For real,” said the kid in glasses by the wall. “He could have talked to Caesar and been like, ‘Hey man, you’re being a real dictator,’ but instead he stabbed him. Unless you want someone dead, stabbing shouldn’t be your first option.”

  “All right,” I said, “so despite Shakespeare telling us repeatedly that Brutus acted on noble motives, none of you buy it?” The handful of students paying attention shook their heads no, and I said, “It does say here in my notes that, in Dante’s Inferno, Brutus is one of only three people bad enough to be chewed in Satan’s mouth for eternity, so maybe you guys are on to something. But after the assassination, Brutus doesn’t make a grab for power, so does anyone else have a theory on why he joined the conspirators? Kyler, why don’t you enlighten us with your thoughts?”

  Kyler looked up from his nap, and after I repeated the question, he said, “Yeah, I think he killed Caesar over some chick. Cleopatra maybe.”

  “Wrong play, Kyler. Cleopatra’s not in this one.”

  “Whatever, Mr. Brinks,” Kyler said. “It’s always about some chick.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “And as the teams head to their locker rooms, Rome leads Sparta, here at the half, 13-10. Bubba and I will be right back with the halftime stats, and the crowning of our homecoming queen, right after this message from our longtime sponsor, Trevi’s BBQ.”

  “Close game,” I said, walking into my mother’s bedroom.

  My mother turned down her radio and said, “Shouldn’t be. I don’t know why that Silas Carver insists on running the most conservative plays sometimes. Third and five from midfield and he runs the damn fullback. Then on fourth and one from the ten, we kick a field goal. It should be 31-10, and I should be going to bed, but no, they’re gonna make me stay up and listen to the whole—” Mom began to cough, and by the time she stopped, she’d lost her train of thought.

  “Silas told me Jackson meddles with the offense; otherwise, they’d set every record in the state.”

  My mother huffed and said, “So sayeth every offensive coordinator in the history of football. Silas is just mad Jackson won’t let him run more than one trick play a game.”

  “He does have some good trick plays,” I said, and Mother smiled and said, “He sure does. Now, tell me again why you are home on a Friday night.”

  “I wanted to spend time with my dear mother.”

  “Hogwash.”

  I shrugged. “Becca wasn’t going to the game, and I didn’t want to go by myself.”

  “She’s still mad at you, isn’t she?”

  “We haven’t spoken much this week, but yeah, I think so. She told me you called her after the article came out.”

  “I did,” my mother said.

  “Well, that was very nice of you.”

  “It was not. I just didn’t want to go to my grave thinking she was mad at you for my sake. But if she’s mad at you for some other reason, there’s not much I can do about it.”

  “She’s mad because she thinks I wasted my life, or at least the last half of it.”

  “Well, she’s not wrong, is she?”

  “Yes ... no ... I don’t know. Sometimes I think that album came too easy. I had these songs in my head, and I felt like, if I didn’t get them out, they’d kill me. There was no process. I wasn’t really an active participant. I just opened a faucet and they poured out, and when it was all over, I couldn’t even say what happened.”

  My mother grinned. “Oh, my poor baby boy. I’m sorry life’s been so cruel to you.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her and said, “You try being called a genius at twenty-one. Unless your last name is Lennon or McCartney, there’s only one direction your career can go from there.”

  “So why do anything if people might criticize it?”

  “That’s the thing, Mom, I tried. I tried to write songs while we toured. I tried when we got home. I tried for months and nothing. And I don’t mean I wrote a bunch of songs but they didn’t live up to the first album so what was the use. I mean I never wrote another single lyric. I had nothing left to say. Whatever part of me music came from was empty.”

  “And lying in a hammock for twenty years didn’t fill it up?” my mother asked with a sly grin.

  “Okay, maybe I wasted some of my life, but people do still talk about our band. If we’d followed up with a bunch of shitty albums, no one would care anymore. But we didn’t, and they do. Not doing anything for the last twenty years wasn’t the worst career move.”

  “I don’t believe that, and neither do you,” Mother said and turned the game back on, and we heard Mr. Gaba say, “Your 2017 Rome homecoming queen is ... Portia Kerr.” We could hear the crowd cheering through the radio, and my mother said, “You know, I’ve heard you playing your guitar at night this week.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I tried to keep it down.”

  “You haven’t bothered me,” Mom said, “but I didn’t recognize the song.”

  She already knew, but she made me say it anyway. “Yeah, I’m writing a new one ... f
or Becca.”

  “Of course you are,” Mom said and squeezed my hand before turning the game back on. She fell asleep during the fourth quarter of what turned out to be a 35-17 win, and when it was over, I turned off the radio, kissed her on the head, and went back to my room to finish my first new song in two decades.

  ~ ~ ~

  I can’t say for certain when the homecoming dance at Rome became a big deal, but it was no longer the informal after-the-football-game affair I remembered. It was still in the gymnasium, because the gymnasium was free, and the Rome Student Government Association didn’t have enough money to rent the Riverton Museum of Art for both homecoming and prom. But the homecoming dance was now on Saturday night, and all the girls now wore dresses, not just the ones on the homecoming court or who mistakenly thought Silas Carver was totally into them. The guys dressed up too. They didn’t rent tuxedos like for prom, but most at least put on a tie—a marked improvement from white T-shirts and wet hair from a post-game shower.

  I volunteered to chaperone because the school paid chaperones two hundred bucks and, as sad as it sounds, I could use the cash. Becca volunteered to chaperone too because chaperones could not bring dates, and this way we could go together, but this was before the newspaper article and our fight. I picked her up an hour before the dance, and she didn’t say much on the drive over, and once inside the gym, she left to talk to another middle school teacher, leaving me alone to watch the band set up.

  A few students were putting the finishing touches on the decorations, and the crazy girl who took selfies with me every day stopped for a photo, then the SGA President, a girl I couldn’t name but recognized from school assemblies, walked by and I asked, “What happened to DJ Push-a-Button?”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “When I went to Rome, there was a car salesman from Riverton who DJ’d all the dances. He kinda sucked.”

  The girl shrugged and said, “I’m not sure. These guys have played homecoming the last four years. They’re an eighties cover band. They kinda suck too.”

  I went over to talk to the guys in the band, because Becca continued to ignore me, and I felt self-conscious sitting on the bleachers alone.

  “Hearing Impaired Leppard,” a man in spandex pants and what I hope was a wig said, when I asked him the name of his band. I laughed and he asked, “Are you a chaperone?” I nodded, and he said, “We all went to Sparta. Rome absolutely destroyed us my senior year. I’m Elliott by the way.”

  I shook his hand and said, “Marcus. Marcus Brinks.”

  “Marcus Brinks,” he said, “like the lead singer of Dear Brutus.”

  “I was the lead singer of Dear Brutus,” I said.

  “Ha,” he said, but after a double-take, added, “Holy shit, you were, weren’t you?”

  Elliott called the other members of Hearing Impaired Leppard over to meet me—the drummer had both arms but played with one tucked in his sleeve—and after taking some selfies with them, I asked, “By the way, could you guys do me a favor tonight?”

  ~ ~ ~

  Ten minutes before the doors opened and the dance began, Principal Trajan gathered the chaperones for final instructions. “I need eyes on the punch bowl at all times,” he barked like a general going into combat, “and we must halt any dancing that exceeds a PG-13 rating. A child may be conceived tonight but not in this gymnasium.” Mrs. Nero asked how we’d know if dancing exceeded PG-13, and Principal Trajan said, “You’ll know it when you see it. Now good luck men and stay safe.”

  The doors opened, the students flooded in, and the dance began, with the lads from Hearing Impaired Leppard working through the same catalog of eighties hits DJ Push-a-Button played two decades ago. Becca kept her distance, leaving me to spend the first hour of the dance standing next to the biology teacher, Mr. Severus, who droned on about frogs while I watched the punch bowl. The homecoming song was “When I’m with You,” a power ballad released by the Canadian band Sheriff in 1983. I wasn’t sure if the senior class selected this song ironically, or if kids from Rome always have and always will love eighties power ballads, but either way, the boys from Hearing Impaired Leppard performed it admirably before taking their last break of the evening. Then I was on.

  The students shuffled off the dance floor toward the food and punch, and no one noticed me plug my acoustic guitar into the amp. I bumped my chin into the microphone, steadied myself, and said, “This is an old song I learned to play a long time ago,” then I shut my eyes, began to strum, and sang.

  My voice was shaky. It was always a little shaky but felt extra so after years of neglect, and as I sang the final line of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” I wondered if I could get through another song, but I continued playing, eyes shut, and sang, “Rebecca please, believe me when I say ...”

  I fumbled through the new song, sang one verse twice, left another out entirely, and pulled a muscle in my back belting out the last “Rebecca, pleeeeease.” But I made it through, and when the song was over, I mumbled into the microphone, “And that was a new song,” but I couldn’t open my eyes, because no one was clapping. Not even politely. But the Earth refused to open up and swallow me whole, so after a moment, I dared to look and saw every student in the school recording me on their cell phones, and standing in front of me, alone on the dance floor, was Becca.

  She was smiling through her tears.

  “Friends of the eccentric rocker expressed concern last month after learning Brinks, during a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York, downed four bottles of wine, stripped to his boxers, and threatened to throw a fellow passenger’s guide dog out the emergency door somewhere over Kansas.”

  —People, “The Rise and Fall of Marcus Brinks,” July 25, 1999

  Chapter Nineteen (1994)

  “It’s got to be at your house, Brinks. My parents never go anywhere. They haven’t even seen a movie in the theatre since Top Gun.”

  “Well, my mom stays at Steve’s some nights, but it always seems spur of the moment. There’s no way I could plan for it.”

  “Does she keep a planner in her purse? Maybe she writes it in there.”

  Silas sat between Jackson and me and asked, “What we talking about?” But when neither of us answered, he said, “Dammit, I refuse to waste another lunch period listening to you two plot the demise of Deacon Cassburn.”

  “Can we talk about those then?” Jackson asked, pointing toward Silas’s new cowboy boots. The previous Saturday, the night after Rome defeated Sparta to run its record to 9-0, Silas went line dancing without us. By now, everyone in school, minus Jackson and me, went every Saturday night. Some kids were even wearing cowboy hats and chaps to school. And sure, this is Alabama, but I can promise you kids in the nineties didn’t typically go around dressed for a rodeo. It was like going to school at the Grand Ole Opry, and it somehow made Rome suck even worse.

  “We can talk about how jealous you are of them,” Silas said.

  Jackson ignored this and asked, “Do your parents ever go anywhere on weekends?”

  “No, but even if they did, I’m not helping you with whatever it is you’ve schemed up,” Silas said then leaned in and whispered, “He’s the starting quarterback of what may be the first undefeated team in school history. Do you have any idea how much everyone in school would hate you if you ruined that?”

  “No one will ever find out it was—” I started to say but stopped mid-sentence when Becca Walsh placed a note in front of me and walked away. As I opened it, Jackson said, “Careful, the last time she gave you a note, it led directly to an ass-kicking.”

  “I don’t think they got back together,” Silas said. “They’re not sitting by each other in every class at least. What’s it say?”

  “To call her after school,” I said, and they both shook their heads with what I think was pity.

  ~ ~ ~

  Back in the day, when you wanted to communicate with a member of the opposite sex, or anyone for that matter, you had to call them on a landline telephone. This invol
ved punching seven consecutive numbers into the phone, each one giving you ample opportunity to panic and hang up. Becca’s number was 315-0044—I still remember it and all my friend’s parent’s landline numbers twenty years later, yet forget my ATM PIN on a weekly basis—and it took me three tries to hit that last four. And this was calling a girl who asked me to call her; you can imagine the sheer terror of cold-calling a girl. I finally punched that last four though, and the phone rang twice before Becca answered.

  “Can you come over tonight around six?” Becca asked. I was there at 6:01.

  Becca’s parents lived on Aventine Hill in a two-story brick house on South Eagleville Road, and when she opened the door wearing her Lisa Loeb glasses, I could tell she’d been crying.

  “Are you okay?” I asked as she grabbed my hand and walked me through the house. The lights in the kitchen and den were off, and I was pretty sure her parents weren’t home as she led me into her bedroom and handed me a CD.

  “It came out today,” she said, and I looked at the case—it was Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York.

  Becca pressed play on her CD player, and “About a Girl” came through the speakers, and she sat on her bed and said, “I ... I didn’t know how much I missed him until I listened to this. I’ve cried all afternoon.”

  Kurt Cobain died over seven months ago, and MTV had aired Nirvana’s Unplugged special almost exclusively ever since, but I suppose you can’t fault the way other people grieve. I sat next to Becca on her bed and said, “It’s a great album.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “He was beautiful.” Then, over the opening bass riff of “Come as You Are,” she said, “Deacon and I are seeing other people.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Like, we’re together, but we can see other people I guess.”

  Her hand was on mine now, and I knew if I looked at her we’d kiss. I mean, I didn’t want to be co-boyfriends with Deacon but figured we could work all that out later. I turned to tell her something I’d read about Dave Grohl, but before I could, we kissed. We kissed through “Come as You Are” then fell back on her bed and made out through the David Bowie song, and “Dumb," and “On a Plain," and then the three Meat Puppets’ songs, even the weird one about birds. And it wasn’t until forty-five minutes later, during “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” that we noticed her parents standing in the doorway.