Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
SEVENTH INSTALLMENT
THE POMPOM GIRL
By the year 2000, my stint as an ersatz New Yorker had ended. At heart, I wasn’t a New Yorker, and Rebecca, my girlfriend for the past three years, wasn’t a Southerner either, much less an Arkansan. It was unwise to try to turn people into something they were not. I was content to be back full time in Jonesboro, which was said to be a good place to raise a family — though at age 40 I had no wife, no children, nor even any romantic prospects.
Then, two years after my return home, I met a special woman at a health club in Jonesboro. She was seated on a leg press machine, and I’d been furtively casting my eyes in her direction when she looked at me in the floor-to-ceiling mirror and said, “Do I know you?”
She was vaguely familiar, yet I couldn’t quite place her. So in a hopeful tone I said, “Maybe,” and introduced myself.
Some 20 years before, Susanne Williams and I had both attended the University of Arkansas, but we hadn’t known each other. Then, when she mentioned that she’d been a pompom girl, it hit me: During my college days, I’d admired her from afar — from high in the stands at Razorback Stadium, to be exact. She had fantastic legs.
Call me shallow, but this connection to our Razorback-related past caused a vibration inside me. I considered this link as valid as any of our other mutual associations: Susanne had grown up in the same nearby town in eastern Arkansas where my father had lived until he was 12, and, as is typical in a small state like Arkansas, she knew people I knew, and vice versa. She’d even been a member of the same sorority as Darla Lacey, the coed with whom I’d had the non-date blind date to the TCU game more than two decades before.
Just weeks after this chance encounter, I went to the 2002 Cotton Bowl with my dad and my sister, where, on a bitterly cold afternoon, we sat through one of the Five Worst Razorback Games of All-Time, a 10-3 loss to Oklahoma during which the Hogs amassed a whopping total of 50 yards. Fifty yards. In a stat I’d never seen, the Hogs ran more plays (55) and had more yards in penalties (54) than they had in total offense. Watching this game was about as much fun as counting the number of white pickup trucks parked out in the surrounding acreage of the Texas Fairgrounds.
Nevertheless, I was hardly soured on Arkansas football. I was on to romancing the pompom girl of my notso-distant memory.
*
Seaside is a portrait-perfect, moneyed village on the Emerald Coast of Florida’s Panhandle where high-dollar shotgun houses are painted in the pale pastels of the sea, sand, and sky, where teenagers play hacky sack on the great lawn, where the smell of saltwater mingles with fresh-baked calzone from the pizzeria. This paradise of New Urbanism architecture isn’t the real America. But it isn’t surreal either, like Disneyland. It hits a sweet spot just in between.
Out in the blue waters, swimmers bobbed in the sunshine and a few dolphins frolicked. Susanne and I walked hand in hand on the white sand beach. Just out in the shallows, a group of men tossed a football. I caught the eye of one of them and broke into a trot, one arm raised like a wide receiver. His pass led me almost perfectly, and I made a nifty back-shoulder catch as an incoming wave undercut me.
“Razorback fan,” I shouted over the roar of the ocean.
“Go Hogs,” the passer said, with a chortle.
Behind me, I heard the claps of several bikini-clad women who sat under a tent adorned with a big Georgia Bulldog “G” in a red oval. This entire area along the Gulf Coast was a kind of St. Tropez for football-obsessed Southerners, who touted their fandom with their sunbrellas and hats and T-shirts and towels bearing the logos of the LSU Tigers, Alabama Crimson Tide, Auburn Tigers, or some such.
Later, Susanne and I made our way to the open-air bar at Bud & Alley’s Restaurant with its sweeping view out over the surf. Down on the beach, a well-to-do couple was being wed. The bartender clanged a rusty ship’s bell to mark the evening’s sunset. That day’s winner of a free drink was a doctor’s wife from Atlanta who’d guessed the exact minute the sun slipped below the horizon.
Susanne squeezed my hand. “This is great!” she said with her luring smile. We’d been together over two years, and this vacation was intended to take her mind off her recently-concluded custody battle over her son, which she’d lost, plus the pending custody battle over her younger daughter.
“Maybe we should just both move down here,” she said, as the wind ruffled her blond bangs. “It would be heaven.”
I listened with psychiatric silence. As rattled as Susanne was by her serial legal battles, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of her up and leaving Jonesboro, even though she took an aspirational view of my hometown much as I did of New York. It was where she’d always wanted to live.
“I couldn’t do it though,” she continued. “I couldn’t move down here. I’d miss my kids.”
“I know. You’re right.”
I drained the last of my frozen margarita and watched a squadron of pelicans fly low along the beach. The horizon was washed with purple and orange, yet my sunset view was broken when a half-drunk blaggard walked past wearing an authentic, down-tohis-knees LSU jersey. This sight, of course, caused me to think about the upcoming 2003 football season, which in turn called to mind the fate of poor Mike Price.
Hired the previous December as the head coach at Alabama, he’d been fired only five months later after he visited a strip bar in nearby Pensacola called Arety’s Angels, where he conspicuously dropped hundreds of dollars on drinks and lap dances. He’d wound up in a hotel room with a stripper named Destiny Stahl, who dinged his credit card for $1,000 in room service. She’d ordered at least one of everything on the menu in to-go boxes.
Most of us are guilty of an overinflated view of ourselves, but apparently Mike Price had no idea what he represented as the head football coach at Alabama. Perhaps he could carry on like this out in Pullman, Washington. Who cared how he’d spent his evenings when he’d been the head coach of the Washington State Cougars?
But unleashed down here on the playground of what’s affectionately known as the Redneck Riviera, Mike Price had naively thought he could behave as if he were just another fun-seeking good ole boy with a wad of 20-dollar bills in his hip pocket. (Too, he didn’t account for pesky Auburn fans—one in particular with the avatar of Eagle-Klaw on autigers.com — who ratted him out.)
A lady walked by our table wearing a black-and-white houndstooth blouse with the Alabama “A” emblazoned on it. It was too much.
“Why are you laughing?” Susanne said.
“Well, you see, there was this football coach and he went to a strip club down here…”
She looked at me, puzzled.
“Ah, never mind.”
Susanne could hardly be expected to share the impish delight I felt over how Alabama had screwed up its most-recent coaching search. Nor did she appreciate that lower Alabama was the epicenter of the college football universe. On our drive down to the Gulf Coast, we’d stopped at a flea market where I’d showed her a glass-enclosed display full of books about the glorious history of Alabama football. This display was well lit, the glass spotless as if the tomes inside were signed first editions of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Unfortunately, her mind had been on scouring the flea market for bowls and vases made of cut glass.
But I was crazy about her, anyway.