by Rex Pickett
The Hitching Post is a nut-brown, wood-framed, windowless building whose location is inconspicuously marked by a small yellow neon sign. As we approached, smoke from the wood-burning barbecue pierced our nostrils with enticing aromas of grilling steaks and other guilty pleasures.
At first glance, the Hitching Post resembles any other chophouse with its cheerless décor and typical fare. But on closer inspection one realizes that they’ve incorporated the local wine milieu into their operation, marrying all those slabs of beef with a variety of artisanal Pinot Noirs. The wines were overpriced for what they were—thin, lacking in strength—but where else could you get a decent glass of wine and a hamburger in a small town?
Inside, we strode past the hostess into the cocktail lounge, a low-ceilinged, wood-paneled room with a small L-shaped bar and a television mounted on the wall in the far corner over the kitchen entrance. Charlie, the Samoan bartender with his three inner tubes of a stomach barely
“Hey, Miles, how’re you doing?” Charlie said, extending his hand across the bar. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
I took his hand. It was a damp, bear-sized paw that you didn’t really grasp so much as cower inside of. “Not bad,” I replied. “Been busy.”
“When’s that book of yours coming out?” he asked, releasing my hand. “Everyone here’s dying to read it.”
“Soon, Charlie, soon,” I answered, as a buried memory of a drunken night some months ago, when lies poured as abundantly as the Pinot, struggled to surface.
“How about a couple of glasses of Pinot?” Charlie asked.
“You read my mind, big fella,” I said, brightening. “How’s the ’99 Bien Nacido?”
“Want a taste?”
“Yeah, give us a taste, would you?”
Charlie slid two Burgundy glasses out from the overhead rack and set them in front of Jack and me. He uncorked a fresh bottle of the ’99 Bien Nacido on a commercial cork extractor with one powerful pistonlike action and poured a sizable, glad-to-see-you-again sample in each glass. “Tell me what you think.”
I swirled the wine in the glass, sat back on my stool, sniffed the wine, then gestured to Jack. “Oh, this is my friend, Jack. He’s getting married next week.”
“Oh, yeah? Congratulations. Now, I guess the only thing you have to look forward to is divorce.” Charlie laughed at his own remark.
“One step at a time,” Jack said, sipping his wine.
Charlie pointed a chubby finger at my glass. “What do you think?”
Jack faced me with arched eyebrows, awaiting the verdict.
“Tighter than a nun’s asshole, but decent concentration. Let’s drink to its future. Pour us a couple.”
“Mm,” Jack said. “Nice. You’re right, not as big as the La Rinconada, but delectable nonetheless.”
“Actually, it’s disappointing at ten dollars a glass,” I whispered to Jack. “I just didn’t want to offend him. We’ll drink much better wines this week, I promise you.”
Charlie filled the squat bottoms of our Burgundy glasses, emptying half the bottle in the process and endearing us to him for the evening.
“Thank you, Charlie,” I said. “Guess we’ll look at a couple of menus.”
“Going to eat at the bar tonight?”
“Might as well be close to the source.”
Charlie chuckled as he reached under the bar and produced two menus. Then he lumbered over to serve a middle-aged couple who had the appearance of golfers seeking solace from a bad day at the course.
As Jack and I studied our menus, I couldn’t help stating the obvious: “God, it feels good to be out of that viper pit, L.A.”
“Amen, brother,” Jack concurred. “Amen.”
Something caught his attention and he slowly lifted his head over the menu. I followed the angle of his straying eyes. At the far end of the bar, a tall, strikingly beautiful woman with brunette hair cascading over broad shoulders, in an eye-catching black cocktail dress, appeared with a drinks tray and recited an order to Charlie. She was the
“Check it out,” Jack whispered to me, nodding in the waitress’s direction.
“That’s Maya,” I said tonelessly.
Jack jerked his head in my direction, surprised. “You know her?”
“Yeah.” To prove it, I held up my wineglass and toasted Maya. She responded with a half smile and a quick upward nod of her head.
Jack looked at me again, stunned. “You know that chick?”
“Yeah, I know her. I told you, I come up here all the time. This is the only place I eat. And sometimes I stay late. And the staff often drinks after hours here because there’s no other better place to go.”
“Why don’t you go for her? She’s dynamite.”
“Don’t get too excited. She’s married. Check out the rock and the accompanying band.”
Jack leaned forward and narrowed his eyes, telescoping in on her hand.
“Left hand, ring finger,” I deadpanned.
“Fuck you.”
“Get used to it.”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
“Well?” I challenged.
Jack sipped his wine. “That don’t mean shit. When Babs was maître d’ at the Ivy a long time ago she wore a big ol’ engagement ring just to prevent aggressive fucks from hitting on her. And do you think that stopped them? Hell no. Jack tipped his wineglass toward where Maya had left an empty space. “So, how do you know she’s really married?”
I turned back to my glass of wine, cradled it with both hands, and stared into it reflectively. “It was right after my divorce. We kind of got down one night after hours here at the bar.”
“And she told you about her husband?”
“Yeah. She followed some older lit professor out here to UC Santa Barbara from Vermont or someplace and was going to get her MFA, but things weren’t too cool between them. She admitted they were having problems but that they were working on them.”
“What kind of problems?”
“I don’t remember. Charismatic liberal arts professor. Nubile young students with stars in their eyes who think men their own age come too quickly. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure out being married to one of those guys is rolling the dice. But they must’ve worked it out if she’s still wearing her jewelry.”
Jack bent toward me, intensely interested. “When was this that you got down with her?”
“I don’t know. Year or so ago. Why?”
“If she’s married to a UC professor, what’s she doing working in a place like this?”
“Because she stands proud. She gets free Pinot. She doesn’t want to sit at home. I don’t know.”
“She’s probably divorced now just like you. A lot can happen in a year.” Jack sat up on his stool and leaned across the bar. “I’m going to ask the bartender.”
“No, don’t do that, please,” I pleaded, grabbing him by the shirt and yanking him back onto his stool.
“Why?”
“Why? Because. He’ll tell her that we were asking, and I don’t want her to know that.”
“Well, how’re you going to find out?”
“I don’t want to find out! If she wants me to find out, she’ll tell me. It’s not like she’s lacking for men. She’s got a whole restaurant full of them drooling over her every night.”
Jack sipped his Pinot some more and considered my words, shaking his head slowly in disbelief. He approached the prospect of making Maya’s acquaintance from another angle: “So, what’d you get down about, besides her boring, philandering husband—probably now ex?”
“I don’t remember. I was pretty framed.”
“She probably was, too,” Jack said with a glint in his eyes.
“Oh, that chick is crazy about wine, no argument there.”
“So, come on. What’d you talk about?”
“She likes Pinot, and she knows quite a bit about wine. We probably talked a lot about the local wineries, I don’t know.”
“There you go,” Ja
ck said, throwing up his hands.
“She’s a cocktail waitress in Buellton, Jack. She has a whole life up here that I’m not privy to.”
“What are you? Some kind of fucking elitist?”
“That’s not the issue. I’m a tourist. She’s not moving to L.A. and I’m not moving to Buellton.”
“Fuck, man, who said anything about moving?”
I sighed. I didn’t want to go down this road with Jack and fan his flames. The bar was crowding up and I just wanted to melt into the scene, relax, and lose myself in wine and idle chatter. But Jack wouldn’t give up.
“Given the opportunity,” Jack said restlessly, “you wouldn’t take a ride on that?”
“Why do you always couch everything in sexual terminology?
“Ibex?” He frowned, hating it when I used a word he didn’t know.
“Wild goat. Man beast. Satyr. Priapus. Take your pick.”
When I looked up, Jack was gawking at me. Then, his eyes crinkled and he started laughing. “Miles, you crack me up.”
Maya returned from the dining room to her station for another round of drinks. Jack was staring at her as if she were a moving monument to womanhood. Which, in fact, she was.
“She’s a sweet girl, in a crumbling marriage, marooned in a small town she didn’t grow up in, and I don’t think she’d like it if she knew you were talking about her like this,” I said.
“Oh, bullshit. I’m having a hormone meltdown just looking at her. Jesus. She’s jammin’. And you know her?” He turned and regarded me in amazement. “Take advantage of the gift.”
Just then Maya locked eyes with me and smiled warmly. Jack glanced excitedly back and forth at the two of us as if his head were mounted on ball bearings. Charlie set four glasses of wine on her tray. Maya kept looking at me the entire time, and for a moment I felt vaguely desired. She said something to Charlie, then, just before she turned to go, she winked at me. Jack caught the gesture and pounced on it.
“She fucking winked at you!” he said, rising up off his stool.
“She does that to everyone.”
“Bullshit. There are winks and then there are winks,”
“What’re you getting all worked up about?”
“What am I getting all worked up about?” he echoed snidely. “Oh, I don’t know. She might have a friend. Two girls, two guys, small town, wine country …” Jack knocked back his Pinot and motioned to Charlie to refresh our glasses.
“There’s no way that woman is interested in me. No way.”
Charlie heaved over with a full open bottle, poured us each a glass, and placed it on the bar between the two of us. “It’s on Maya.”
Jack turned to me and slapped a hand over his mouth in mock astonishment. “Oh, my God, she must hate your guts.”
I sheepishly tossed Maya a schoolboy’s wave. She smiled You’re welcome back, and all Jack could do was slowly shake his head.
We ordered off the menu—Jack: filet mignon; me: duck breast; both ideal complements with the Pinot, which we drank with relish. I kept trying to coax the Bien Nacido out, but it never really opened up the way I had hoped, remaining budded and hidden from its full expression. Maya came and went, stoking Jack’s libido with every appearance.
Jack wanted to hang around the bar after we had finished dinner, drink more wine, and wait until Maya got off her shift, but the congested room was already beginning to feel suffocating, and, more important, I feared a long intoxicated evening with a woman I barely knew and an
Outside, the night chill freshened our flushed faces and invigorated us for the half-mile-long walk back to the Windmill. It was a commercial district and many of the businesses had closed for the night. As we walked along the shoulder of 246, vehicles of all sizes hurtled by in both directions, the 18-wheelers buffeting us with the velocity of their passing. In between the roar of revving engines, the highway grew still for brief moments and we could hear the gentle hum of insects fill the void. We were a little tipsy from the two bottles of wine, but the universe was still comparatively in order.
Jack bumped my shoulder and I bumped him back. “I could take you,” I said unconvincingly.
“Oh, right,” Jack said, looming over me with hands on hips.
I adopted a boxer’s pose. Jack did likewise, and we shadowboxed against the side of the road, feigning left jabs and right crosses, ducking and feinting, until both of us were laughing so hard tears sprang to our eyes. To passing motorists, we must have looked like some bad vaudeville duo who had been unceremoniously drummed out of town.
It was still relatively early and going back to the motel wasn’t really in the cards for Jack. He kept trying to persuade me to go back to the Hitching Post, but I wasn’t in the mood.
“So, what do you want to do?” he said. “’Cause I ain’t ready to call it a night.”
“What about a movie?”
“A movie?” He smirked. “You mean like with a big box
“Okay, bad suggestion.”
“I’m on vacation. I’m getting married a week from tomorrow. I want to party.” He swept an arm grandiloquently across a desolate expanse of car dealerships, minimarts, and supermarkets. “Where’s the action around here on a Saturday night?”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll take you to the happening place.” We headed back to the Windmill Inn and rolled into the Clubhouse, the motel bar. It was a spacious, tacky joint, with tiled mirrors serving as one wall behind a horseshoe-shaped bar that showcased a raft of available stools. In the center of the place, Naugahyde club chairs circled laminated wood tables that were grouped in front of a carsized parquet dance floor. This was flanked by a barely elevated stage on which stood some kind of amplifier console and microphone stand.
Jack was underwhelmed. “This is it?”
“It’ll pick up.”
Jack looked skeptical. I pivoted onto a stool. Jack placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Order me something, I’ve got to make a phone call.” He unfolded his cell and strode outside, seeking privacy.
I surveyed the scene. The Clubhouse’s customers were a mixed crew of locals, the early crowd made up of construction and service workers and other minimum wagers, shooting pool and quenching their thirst with pitchers of beer. The men wore jeans and T-shirts and grease-stained baseball caps, and the women were in tight jeans and halter tops. It had the feel of a place that could get downright rowdy given the right amount of excessive drinking.
The bartender came over to take my order. He was a quiet man with thinning red hair and a cadaverous face, courtesy of too many bartending jobs breathing other people’s cigarettes, bending a tin ear to the incessant palaver of wrecked lives, and enduring countless soul-withering 2:00 A.M. close-ups.
“What’s up tonight?” I said, nodding toward the dance floor.
“Karaoke,” he replied.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. What can I get you?”
“Any Pinot?”
“What?”
“Pinot Noir. Red wine.”
“No.”
“Any red wine at all?”
“Cabernet and Merlot. That’s it.”
“Pour me two glasses of the Cab.”
“Coming right up.” He turned and crossed to the back of the bar, uncorked a bottle of already-opened Firestone—a mediocre local winery that valued quantity over quality—filled two generic wineglasses inappropriate for Cabernet, and put them down in front of me. I laid a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and he plucked it away, rang the order up on his register, then returned and fanned the change out on the bar as if I were going to contest the transaction. A nasty scar dividing one side of his face caused me to imagine that he once had to defend himself over just such a misunderstanding. He turned his attention back to a TV bolted into the wall, not interested in conversation.
I sipped the overly oaked Cab, puckering at its harshness and total absence of forward fruit. It was the kind of
A shrill noise interrupted my reverie. I
swiveled around on my stool for a view of the dance floor. A young woman, with long, ropy black hair tumbling over a Pea Soup Andersen’s uniform, had mounted the stage and was turning on the karaoke apparatus, creating a few seconds of ear-splitting amplifier feedback. Her cronies, who were dawdling around the pool table, whistled and hooted as she selected a song, wrapped a hand around the microphone, and waited for the music to kick in. A Fleetwood Mac song—“Landslide,” for Christ’s sake!—started and the girl came to life, imitating Stevie Nicks’s familiar voice and stage movements, singing so ingloriously out of tune that I wondered why she would actually want to pay for the privilege of publicly humiliating herself.
As her performance droned on and her tone-deaf voice blared away in ever bolder flourishes, her contingent of supporters broke into wild howls of execration, shaking their fists and beating their cue sticks against the floor. It was as if her intent wasn’t to prove whether she could sing, but to be the self-appointed object of her friends’ derision. I reached the twin conclusions that she did have a purpose in life, and that Jack and I weren’t exactly at the “in” spot.
Jack materialized out of the crowd and claimed a bar stool next to me. He reached for his glass and took an ample mouthful of wine in a show of anger.
“Local swill, sorry.” I raised my chin toward the karaoke stage where “Stevie Nicks” was winding down her act.
“I heard.” Jack shook his head. “Jesus. That’s frightening.”
I turned to him. He had a sour look on his face. I assumed the phone call had upset him. “Call Babs?”
“Yeah,” he said unhappily.
“How is she?”
“Fine.”
“How she holding up?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“What’s happening?”
