Silas laughed, and propping himself up with his left crutch, proceeded to hit a one-armed, high, fading seven-iron off the rear bumper of an Oldsmobile that doubled as the 150-yard marker.
“We’ll always have Bertha,” Silas said then proceeded to hit the car twice more.
Jackson teed up another ball and, overcompensating for his slice, hooked it deep into the woods, drawing an evil glare from Bertha. He cursed and said, “Okay, this sucks too, and there are considerably fewer hot girls in tight jeans here, but Brinks didn’t want to line dance either.”
I’d just teed up a ball of my own and said, “True, but hitting golf balls in a cow pasture was not my suggestion.” I swung at the ball, missed it entirely, and felt pain in every bone and muscle Deacon had punched, kicked, or stomped a fortnight ago. “Shit!” I shouted.
“No cursing, asshole!” Bertha screamed from her shed.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and Jackson asked, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, wincing. “It’s just my bones and organs and stuff still aren’t quite right from a couple weeks ago.”
“See?” Jackson said after shanking a wedge that almost hit Silas, “We’ve got to take that dickhead down.”
“Not this shit again,” Silas said and walked off toward Bertha’s shed.
“You in, Brinks?” Jackson asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Seriously man, what do you have to lose at this point?”
“Feeling in my extremities. Functioning kidneys. Some of my favorite teeth.”
“But he’ll never know it was us,” Jackson said.
“Are you gonna go all Tonya Harding and hire someone to whack his knee?” Silas asked, coming back with two beers and handing me one.
“What the hell? Bertha sold you beer?” Jackson asked.
“She’s selling alcohol out of a shed on her farm without a liquor license,” Silas said. “Shockingly, she didn’t bother to check my ID.”
Silas and I opened our beers, and Jackson shook his head and said, “No, I’m not planning to hurt him. But think about it; if we can get him thrown off the team, he loses all his power. Football is his Kryptonite.”
“That analogy makes no sense at all.”
“Shut up. You both know what I mean. We’ve just got to think of a way to get him thrown off the team.”
Silas set down his beer and dinged another seven-iron off the rusted Oldsmobile before turning to us and saying, “If you do this, you’ve gotta keep it on the down-low. No one can ever find out it was you.”
“Us,” Jackson corrected.
“No, you,” Silas said. “Because if he gets kicked off the team, Rome isn’t winning state, and if the school finds out you cost Rome a state championship, they’ll crucify you.”
“No one will know it was us,” Jackson said.
“You,” Silas corrected.
“So what are you thinking?” I asked. “Like, slipping a laxative into his Gatorade before kickoff?”
“No, Brinks. I want him off the team for good, not missing the first half with the shits.”
“You could put a dead hooker in his trunk and call the cops,” Silas offered, and Jackson flipped him off.
“You’re right,” Silas said. “The Rome Police Department wouldn’t even arrest him for that.”
“Okay,” Jackson said, “now you’re thinking. It’s got to be legal trouble, but something outside of Rome, because we know the Rome police won’t do shit to him.”
“Dude,” Silas said, “it’s October. We’ve got eight months of Deacon left, then we’ll never see him again.”
“Pussy,” Jackson said, and Silas nearly decapitated him with a swinging crutch.
“Brinks, can I count on you?” Jackson asked.
“Probably not,” I said and tried to hit a ball one-handed, thinking that would hurt less. It didn’t, but I did make contact and sent the ball rolling toward Bertha, who was not amused.
“You didn’t say no,” Jackson said. “I’ll put you down as maybe.”
~ ~ ~
Mom’s boyfriend Steve was at our house when I got home, two minutes before curfew. He’d been there a lot the past few weeks, which wasn’t great because he, how can I put this delicately, sucked donkey balls.
“I’m home,” I said, walking through the den, where Mom and Steve sat on the couch, watching some Tom Cruise movie they’d rented from Blockbuster.
“Yeah, we can see that,” Steve said, and I glared at him before turning to go upstairs to my room.
“Hold up there, son,” Steve said, jumping off the couch. “I need to make sure you didn’t get your ass beat again.”
He was in my face, making a show of examining me with an imaginary magnifying glass, and said, “Nope, all these bruises look old.”
“Steve, leave him alone,” my mom said.
“What?” Steve asked, rejoining her on the couch. “That’s why boys should play football. It toughens them up.”
I turned to go upstairs again, and Steve said, “Hold up, son. I’m not done talking to you.”
“I’m not your son, Steve,” I said, and he started to get off the couch, but Mom put a hand on his shoulder, and he sat back down. Was he going to fight me too? What the hell was wrong with people in this town?
“Good night, Marcus,” my mom said, and I went up to my room and hated Rome until I fell asleep.
Chapter Sixteen (2017)
“You gave Darryl Loder an interview?”
Alabama offers no guarantees of crisp, fall weather. October temperatures in the nineties are not unheard of, and though I cannot prove it, I suspect slutty Halloween costumes originated here to combat the autumn swelter. Rome’s default setting is hot and muggy, calendar be damned, but mercifully, we were in the middle of a cool snap that October, and the weather had my mother feeling well enough to venture from her bedroom. She was in the kitchen that morning, sipping coffee and ignoring the plate of eggs Rita had scrambled.
“Well, good morning to you too,” she said as I sat across the table.
I held up the Friday edition of the Riverton Times and asked again, “You gave Darryl Loder an interview?”
“Of course not,” she said, moving her eggs around with a fork. “He called, and we had a little chat, but it wasn’t an interview. No one would want to interview me, Marcus.”
“He’s the editor of the newspaper, Mom. Of course, it was an interview.”
My mother reached for the paper, but I pulled it away, pointed at the front-page article, and said, “You told him I didn’t speak to you for ten years?”
“You didn’t speak to me for ten years.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t have to tell the world.”
I walked to the counter and poured myself a cup of coffee, and my mother said, “You know, Darryl is an atheist.”
“Yeah, Mom, I know. We were in school together.”
“Marcus, are you mad?” she asked as I sat back across from her.
I took a sip of coffee, sighed, and said, “No ... I’m not mad. But this article makes me look awful, and I wish my own mother wasn’t one of the primary sources.” I held up the paper and read aloud, “Every mother dreams of their son winning a Gramy, but not at the expense of their relation with the child.”
“That’s true,” my mother said.
“No, it’s not,” I said, louder than I meant to. “First, he misspelled “Grammy.” Second, we didn’t win a Grammy; we were nominated for Best New Artist but lost to Paula Cole. And third, my band had nothing to do with what happened between us.”
“I told him that was all my fault,” Mom said. “Did he leave that part out?”
“He left it out,” I said and handed her the paper.
“That’s not a flattering picture of you,” she said, pointing to the article about the Rome Fire Department’s new Dalmatian mascot.
I couldn’t help but laugh, and she said, “Marcus, I am sorry if I embarrassed you.”
“That�
��s okay,” I said and kissed her on the head. “Yours is the least embarrassing part of the article. Love you, Mom. I’ll see you after school.”
~ ~ ~
I hadn’t given an interview since an admittedly bizarre 1999 Q&A with Rolling Stone after the cancellation of our first and only headlining tour. But unlike some other reclusive celebrities, I quickly faded from the public consciousness, and no sooner was I out of sight, I was out of mind. Which was fine with me. I had all the money I needed, or at least I thought I did, and I’d grown tired of answering the same questions with the same lies ad nauseam.
But then I pissed off Deacon by not joining his little coup, so he had Darryl, local atheist and editor of the Riverton Times, do a little digging and write a mostly libelous hit piece on yours truly. Suddenly, I was news again, but I took some solace in the fact that no one reads the Riverton Times. Most days, Rita threw my mother’s copy away still in the wrapper. And if a sixty-seven-year-old woman doesn’t read the paper, I thought there was no way the teenagers in my first-period class had seen the article. I was wrong.
After the tardy bell rang and Kyler walked in late, I took a bite of my breakfast apple and said, “Okay, Julius Caesar, act two, scene one, who wants to read for us?”
The mousy-looking girl on the front row raised her hand, and when I called on her, she said, “Mr. Brinks, you were in the paper today.”
“Yes, I was,” I said, sitting on my desk. “But so was Kyler,” I said, pointing toward the young quarterback already napping at his desk, “so that’s not much of an accomplishment.” Kyler looked up, confused, and some of the class dared to laugh at their quarterback.
“Did you really live in a hotel in Jamaica for sixteen years?” asked the short blonde sitting next to the air conditioner.
“No ... well, yes,” I said, “but it was a nice, all-inclusive place. I wasn’t like Rick Majerus living in the Salt Lake City Marriott.”
“Who?”
“There was this man who coached basketball in Utah, and he—you know what, it’s not important. Julius Caesar, who wants to—”
“Wait, you were a basketball coach?” asked the guy in glasses sitting against the far wall. “I thought you were in a band.”
“What? No, I—”
“No, dumbass,” the guy behind him said. “Castro won’t let them play basketball in Jamaica.”
“That’s not—”
“Why did you live in a hotel that long?” asked the curly-haired girl near the door.
“Because they had nice hammocks,” I said, “and alcohol was included, and I was trying to drink myself to death.”
“Oh.”
“I’m joking. Sort of,” I said, walking over to look out the window. “But I didn’t check in thinking I’d stay there sixteen years. When we were on tour in Europe, our record label kept asking to hear material for a second album, but I hadn’t written the first song.”
“That’s some hall-of-fame-level procrastination,” said the mousy-looking girl on the front row.
I smiled and said, “It’s not that I was putting it off. I literally couldn’t write another song. The part of my brain responsible for lyrics and melodies was empty. The stress finally got to me, so I walked off stage one night in Amsterdam, spent a few months in New York keeping the tabloids busy, then went back to college.”
“Your Wikipedia page says you dated Sarah Michelle Gellar,” said the short blonde by the air conditioner.
“For real?” I asked, and when she nodded, I said, “No, I didn’t, but please don’t edit it.”
“It says you dated Kate Hudson too,” said the curly-haired girl by the door. “There’s a picture of you two at a club.”
“Our publicists set that up,” I said. “She was dating the lead singer of The Black Crowes then. I never dated anyone famous.”
My classroom mumbled their collective disappointment, and I said, “I finished college, tried writing again, but after a week with no progress, I went on a month-long bender culminating with me punching a police horse in Central Park. My friends were all worried, and they wanted me to go to this super-exclusive resort in Jamaica to relax, but when I got down there, it was booked solid, so I checked into the Sandals next door. I liked it so much I called my accountant and asked if I had enough money to stay a little longer, and he told me I could stay there for fifty years if I wanted to. Of course, he couldn’t have predicted the housing market bubble and that I’d actually go broke in sixteen years, but what can you do?”
“Hey, Brinks,” Kyler said, raising his hand with a smirk, “what will Ms. Walsh think about you nailing all those tourists?”
His classmates giggled, and I rubbed my eyes and said, “It’s Mr. Brinks, Kyler, and—”
“Don’t be embarrassed, Mr. Brinks. I’m proud of you.”
Somehow, Darryl got in touch with David, a former bartender at the Sandals resort where I lived, and he told the Riverton Times, “Whenever a group of women arrived at the resort for a girlfriends’ weekend, and new groups arrived every day, Mr. Brinks made sure I pointed them toward the famous rock star sitting alone across the bar. It’s hard to say how many women, but he kept pace with Wilt Chamberlain for a while.”
Wilt Chamberlain was a famous basketball player, who once claimed he slept with twenty thousand women. The math on this works out to around five hundred women a year, and I promise you, I was never anywhere close to that pace. Did I take advantage of my fame and fortune and a seemingly unending supply of uninhibited women? Maybe. But sex with strangers loses its novelty after a year or two or six. That, and eventually, the women had never heard of me, and after googling me on their phones probably decided they could do better.
“Okay, look,” I said, “there are things in that article I’m not particularly proud of. But I went from young and heartbroken to young and rich and famous way too fast, and, well, it took me a little longer than normal to grow up.”
“I hear you, Mr. Brinks,” Kyler said, “but Ms. Walsh is gonna be pissed, ain’t she?”
I stared at him for a moment and said, “Yeah, probably. Now, Julius Caesar, who is reading for us?”
~ ~ ~
I didn’t see Becca in the lunchroom and could only assume she was pissed off and cut her students’ lunch short to avoid me. I called her when school let out for the day, but my call went to voicemail, so I waited ten minutes and called again with the same result.
I tried texting her.
—Hey, do you want to rent a movie or something tonight?
We had plans for tomorrow night but not tonight, and I suspect she saw through this thinly veiled attempt to find out if she was mad. Her reply came five minutes later.
—Dinner with my parents.
Shit. No emojis from someone who typically used three per text. She was so pissed she didn’t even use a verb.
—Cool. By the way, did you see the article about me in the paper?
This time, she made me wait ten minutes.
—Yes.
Shit. Shit. Shit. She was making me ask, so I asked.
—So, are you pissed?
Thirty minutes later.
—I’ll see you tomorrow night, Marcus.
Shit.
~ ~ ~
On Saturday, one night after our alma mater defeated Koch 35-0 to run its 2017 record to 7-0, the Rome High School Class of 1994 held it’s twenty-three-year reunion. That we reunited in a year not divisible by five was partially my fault but mostly Chase Malone’s, our senior class president who joined the army and now lived in South Korea. A few weeks ago, Becca and I were on her couch, flipping through an old yearbook, and I asked her who at our twenty-year reunion was now fat and/or bald.
“Oh shit,” she said. “We never had a twenty-year reunion. With Chase in Korea, everyone sort of forgot.”
Seconds later, despite my protests, she was one the phone, talking to classmates and reserving the Palatine Bend clubhouse for an evening of alcohol-fueled reminiscing.
Wit
h Becca in charge of the reunion, I didn’t see her that afternoon, and this only added to my anxiety over the previous day’s article, which the Huffington Post had picked up overnight. Around three p.m., I gave up and texted to see if she needed any help. Her reply was brief.
—No.
The reunion began at six p.m., and I fought the urge to show up early so I could talk to Becca. When I did arrive, at a quarter after, I skipped the small talk gauntlet in the clubhouse and found Silas parked by a poolside table out back.
“Brinks, you pimp,” he said as I sat next to him. “I never thought you had it in you.”
I forced a laugh and said, “Thanks, have you seen Becca?”
“Yeah, she was showing the guy from Trevi’s where to put the food when I got here.”
“I think she’s pissed off ... about the article.”
“Why would she be pissed that you slept with a bunch of groupies twenty years ago? Wait, are you two a thing now?”
“No ... yes ... I mean, sort of. We were, at least.”
“Huh,” Silas said then started to add something but put his hand to his mouth and reconsidered.
“What?” I asked. “Were you going to warn me about her again?”
Silas smiled and said, “No, you’d never listen to me anyway. Now go get us some beers.”
I walked inside and saw Becca, but she was talking to a group of people in the corner of the room, so I grabbed two beers and went back outside with Silas.
“Nice win last night,” I said, handing him his beer.
“I guess,” he said. “We had thirty-five points midway through the second quarter, and Jackson shut down my offense. I swear, Brinks, we’d own every record in state history if he’d let me run my damn offense.” He took a sip of his beer and said, “I know this sounds paranoid, but I’m starting to think he’s holding me back because he doesn’t want to lose me. It’s not unheard of for colleges to hire high school coaches these days. Hugh Freeze. Art Briles.”
“Yeah, and those ended well,” I said.
Silas laughed and said, “Look, here comes our fearless leader now.”
The Rome of Fall Page 13
