Sideways

by Rex Pickett

  “I was,” I said.

  She laughed uneasily. “Well, write that book,” she encouraged, trying desperately to conclude the conversation on an optimistic note.

  “Right,” I decrescendoed.

  “I’ve got another call coming in, Miles. Don’t be a stranger.”

  “I promise.”

  She hung up. And that was that. I stood there holding the receiver in my hand as though it were a dead bird. Slowly, I replaced it on the hook, then turned and stared at the vineyards. Everything was imploding, blurred by the despair that had rushed in over me. The landscape started heaving, the sky purpled, clouds raced across it at high velocity, the buzzing of insects rose dramatically in volume. I thought I might be going mad, or at least having a breakdown, and that this was how it happened. It began with visual hallucinations, a sudden retreat into a paranormal world where everything was heightened. Colors were vivid to the point of luridness. Sounds had strange timbres and loud, dissonant crosscurrents. I felt my heart racing. I unpocketed my vial of Xanax and swallowed two as quickly as I could. I planted one hand against the side of the building to steady myself. Shutting my eyes and closing off the world seemed to help. The bitter-tasting Xanax dissolving under my tongue reassured me a little. After a few moments, I mustered up my courage and went back inside, my future no longer hanging in the balance, but foundering instead with every shambolic step.

  Inside Fess Parker’s, the business and conviviality of wine sampling was fully underway. The white table-clothed stations were now all three- and four-deep. As the wine flowed and the participants grew increasingly inebriated, the noise level climbed until eventually it was difficult to hear the person next to you. I had suddenly lost all my ne plus ultra of varietals and now viewed it coarsely as a vehicle to get sideways. With that purpose in mind, I bullied my way to the Brewer-Clifton station, stemware brandished. Out of the din, I vaguely heard some muttering—“Hey, watch out,” “There’s no rush,” “Jerk!”—but I ignored it. My glass was given the usual one-ounce dollop. I jacked it home and belligerently held it out again for the second Pinot.

  “Do you want to rinse your glass?” the Brewer-Clifton rep asked me. He had one of those supercilious goateed faces you see in audiences at cello recitals.

  “No,” I said crossly. “Hit me again.”

  I was poured another dismally tiny amount, and I practically inhaled it.

  I thrust out my glass again. “Pour me a full glass,” I demanded. “I’ll pay for it.”

  He looked at me aghast. “This is a tasting, sir, not a bar.”

  I fished out one of the U.S. Grants Jack had given me and slapped it down on the tablecloth. “Give me a full pour,” I insisted.

  He sneered at my money, then turned brusquely away to serve another party.

  Panic seized me. I scoured the tasting room and spotted Jack chatting up Maya. I could tell by the way Jack was gesticulating and the laughing responses that blossomed in Maya’s pretty face that he was, indeed, trying his damnedest to make amends and charm her into coming to his wedding. I couldn’t believe she would even talk to him after what had happened. But Jack possessed an uncanny ability to mend fences, smooth acrimonies, and come out on the other side unscathed.

  Maya caught me looking and lifted her wineglass in a

  I turned away, unable to bear the thought of actually talking to Maya now. The Xanax had begun to go to work on my central nervous system, dulling my senses. Combined with the wine, it was making me slightly disoriented. I returned my attention to the table. The rep was at the far end, pouring barrel samples and taking in the idiotic purple prose winespeak that filled the room. I picked up one of the bottles and brazenly poured myself a glass.

  The rep darted over with daggers in his eyes and snatched the bottle away from me.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he yelled.

  “I need a drink. I’m not getting enough. I paid good money for this event and I intend to get my fill!”

  “Buy a bottle and go somewhere else.” He reached for the glass in my hand and managed to get a hold of my wrist. The wine sloshed out of the glass, Rorschaching my shirt.

  “Oh, that’s lovely,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jack hurrying over, zigzagging through the crowd. The Brewer-Clifton rep was snapping his fingers above his head, desperate to get the attention of a security person roaming the room.

  “So, you’re not going to pour me a full glass?” I persisted, knowing exactly how obnoxious I was being.

  “You’re going to have to leave, sir,” he said officiously.

  “Fuck you!” I shouted. Then, in juvenile defiance of his authority, I reached for the spit bucket—nearly full from a few hours of avid tasting—raised it aloft with both hands,

  Jack broke into the circle to take charge of the situation. “It’s all right, everyone. His mother just died.”

  Jack roughhoused me through a bewildered knot of oenophiles who had stopped to see what the commotion was and hustled me outside. My head was swimming from the staggering amount of wine I had consumed. My legs were rubbery and I thought for a moment that I was going to die.

  “What’s the matter with you, Homes?” Jack said as he led me toward the parking lot.

  “Novel’s dead,” I slurred, barely able to stand.

  “What?” Jack said, as if he were voicing from underwater.

  “Dead matter. Waste of a forest.”

  “Oh, shit, man,” Jack replied.

  Brad clambered out of the 4Runner and hurried toward us.

  “Help me get him in the car,” Jack said to Brad. “He’s had a little too much.”

  Jack and Brad each took an arm, helped me to my feet, and towed me back to the 4Runner. My legs dragged limply behind me, and my feet hoed the dirt all the way. To passersby I must have looked like a passed-out lush being hauled to the curbside. I remember Jack saying, “Where

  I don’t remember the ride out to Jalama Beach. Snatches of conversation, but that’s about all. According to Jack’s account later, I was babbling some pretty weird shit, as if I had fallen under the spell of some powerful force surging up out of the recesses of my unconscious. I vaguely remember him trying to cheer me up by claiming he had scored Maya as my date for the wedding, but of course that would have been before I poured a bucket of Brewer-Clifton’s finest barrel samples of mass expectorations down my gullet.

  The ocean at Jalama was wild, a vast washing machine of changing whitecaps churned up by a strong afternoon wind. The sky had been bleached of its blue and was the color of desiccated skeletal remains. The campground was too cold for camping, so the parking lot was deserted. The gusting wind blew sand from the beach across the asphalt in whispery drifts.

  I remember staggering across the sand, angled in the direction of the water. Jack kept pulling me back by the arm, then letting me go when I started screaming, then running to catch up with me.

  “Homes? Where’re you going, huh?” he implored, frightened.

  “Hawaii,” I shouted back in my drunken delirium. “I’m going to surf Waimea!” I plunged tangle-footed into the water. It was fucking frigid, but I didn’t care. I saw the sun setting in the distance, hurtling a spear of infinite light directly at me and I thought that it was calling me, that it was where I was meant to go.

  “Come back, man,” Jack pleaded from the shore.

  But I had seen the light, I had seen my path to heaven unfolding before me, and there was nowhere else for me in the universe.

  When I was in waist-high water, I looked back and saw Jack pulling off his clunky shoes. A wave loomed and broke before I could react and I was sucked under. A moment later, I shot back up, spitting briny water and trying to regain my footing. I dived forward and began a flailing Australian crawl toward what I deliriously thought was the Promised Land. But I seemed to be moving backward. A muscular forearm hooked under my chin and pressed against my Adam’s apple, and I felt myself being towed a
cross the surface of the water like floating driftwood. I thrashed wildly about, but Jack wouldn’t let go of me.

  After a few minutes of struggling, waves bashing us and helping propel us shoreward, we finally managed to slog our way to the water’s edge, soaked to the bone and shivering. The fight was out of me, the St. Vitus’s dance had all but abated, and I lay there on the cold, cement-firm sand, powerless, broken, a dismal failure at both writing and suicide.

  “You scared me, Homes,” I heard Jack say over the roar of crashing waves. “You scared me, man.”

  I opened my eyes and saw a cloud-mottled sky. It seemed to be pitching back and forth, as if it were a two-dimensional backdrop mounted on gimbals and manipulated by a lunatic god. I sat up, turned onto all fours, and puked hard once. Jack had a hand on my neck, I remember, and was massaging it. After I had finished heaving, I lay back down on the sand, enervated. The vomiting had done some good and the cold swim had restored my circulation and I was slowly starting to emerge from my insensible state. I started to think about all the great writers who had

  “What’s so funny?” Jack asked.

  “I’m too insignificant to kill myself,” I voiced my epiphany with a laugh.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Jack consoled.

  “I know,” I said. “Expectations were just so high, you know?”

  “I know, man. Just fucking write another one.”

  The sky seemed to settle a little. Clouds came back into focus. Suddenly, a flock of pelicans flew low just in front of us, obscuring the sun and briefly shadowing us. Tears overwhelmed me.

  “What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

  “Pelicans,” I said, pointing feebly. “That’s beautiful, man. That’s beautiful.”

  There was a half minute of silence and then Jack started to laugh. His laughter, as always, was infectious and I started to laugh, too, through my tears.

  “I wonder what Bradley’s thinking?” I finally said.

  Jack just laughed again in response.

  “And we thought he was nuts.”

  Jack’s laughter doubled and the ground shook from his convulsions.

  Neither of us said anything for a while. It seemed pacific just to lie in the sand, facing nothing but ocean and sky, the real world blissfully at our backs.

  “Maya said she might come to the wedding?” I asked weakly.

  “Yeah, man. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. You’ve got to call her. She wants to talk about it.”

  “Of course now when she finds out my book’s not going to be published,” I started, then faltered, my occupational cynicism momentarily failing me.

  “I already told her you didn’t have a publishing deal sewed up,” Jack confessed.

  “You told her?” I asked, horrified.

  “Yeah. I figure why keep fucking lying.”

  “So, now I’m the loser divorcé who drank from the spit bucket whose novel was turned down by every publisher in New York?”

  “That’s one way of phrasing it,” Jack conceded. “Except that you’ve got a lot of soul, brother.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said wearily.

  Jack sat up on his elbows in the sand. “Fuck, why do you think you’re my friend? Why do you think I want you to be my best man?”

  “Can’t imagine. No takers?”

  “No takers! Fuck. Give me a break, Homes. Give—me—a—break.” Jack shifted into a sitting position and crossed his legs. “You understand me, man. You understand me better than Babs.”

  I didn’t say anything. I clambered to a sitting position, my legs stretched straight out in front of me. Another flock of pelicans winged into view, gliding inches above the surface of the water, their lives simplified to foraging for food and procreating. Envy would be an understatement.

  “How’re you feeling?” Jack asked.

  “Coming around,” I said somberly.

  He hesitated for a moment, then said, “You are coming to the wedding, I hope?”

  I nodded slowly several times. “Yeah.” I kept my eyes on the horizon. The sinking sun was glowing yellow-orange and losing its shape in the mist. The sea was colored a darker shade of blue, and the wind was letting up, quieting its cold, god-forsaken surface.

  Jack climbed to his feet and brushed sand off his clothes. He hooked both of his meaty hands in my armpits and hoisted me up. I was still a little unsteady and shivery cold, so Jack wrapped his arms around me and clenched me tightly to his chest. He patted my back and kept saying, “It’s going to be okay.” This time I allowed my arms to raise up and reach around his torso in reciprocation. He pulled me even tighter toward him. “Come on, Homes. Let’s go get some rest and then drink that Latour, what do you say?”

  “Yeah,” I said, giving the sun and sea one last admiring look over Jack’s shoulder. “Let’s do something.”

  We released each other, then trudged across the beach, stepping over driftwood and zigzagging around piles of seaweed, back to the 4 Runner.

  A dismayed Brad chauffeured us back to the Windmill Inn, our earlier camaraderie replaced by a downcast silence. Jack was no longer the life of the party, Brad was eager to reclaim his Remington for a job well done and get home, and certainly no one expected me to add anything to the somber atmosphere. My depression over the novel’s failure was magnified by the tacit understanding that our friendship was coming to an end. Neither of us was in the mood for conversation.

  When we arrived, it was night, and we were all bone-weary. Jack retrieved Brad’s rifle from the room and ceremoniously presented it to him. Hands were shaken all around. Jack exchanged phone numbers with Brad and invited him to call him if he decided to move to L.A. Brad, in turn, implored Jack to get in touch with him if Jack heard about any grip or driver work. Then, Brad climbed into his truck and chugged off, waving a last good-bye out the window, redeemed.

  Back in the room, I took a long, hot soak in the bath while Jack spoke quietly to his Babs. I assumed they were talking about things couples about to be married talk about, and I was relieved that the tension between them had finally ebbed.

  After a fitful nap, we cleaned up and drove over to Brothers Restaurant in Los Olivos. Two sibling chefs had taken over Mattei’s Tavern, a local landmark, and had transformed it into an unpretentious gourmet restaurant. We got a table in the greenhouse where we were afforded a view of the lighted gardens. We ordered the prime rib, one of their specialties, then I uncorked the ’82 and poured it off into a decanter. Jack wondered if it should breathe a while before we drank it, but I explained to him that old wines often radically change in the first hour they’re opened and that it’s important to track their deterioration, their fading glory.

  There wasn’t a problem with the ’82 fading, however. The wine was so powerfully built at bottling that it still possessed all the necessary components to hold it together. The twenty years had softened it and rounded it and tamed its furred tannins, transforming it into a supple, satiny wine.

  We were drinking a memory, one that would be forever

  When we left Brother’s I noticed that Jack was limping badly.

  On the drive back to Buellton I asked him, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “I think I fucked up my ankle when I went into the ocean. Stepped on a rock or something.” He grimaced. “It’s killing me.”

  SATURDAY: DRESS REHEARSAL

  The next morning I awoke to find Jack sitting on the edge of the bed, his left leg crossed over his right thigh, gently fingering his ankle, which had swollen overnight to twice its normal size. Jack looked at me with a pained expression and I just shrugged.

  We packed up our luggage and cases of wine and checked out of the Windmill Inn. Then we rode back out to Lompoc Hospital for the third time that week. Our friend, the insolent young intern, reared back when he saw us and jestingly made a crude cross with both arms in front of his face like a nun shielding her eyes from an image of sin. Shaking his head, he recommended that we clear out of the area for a while,
joking that the next time he saw us, Jack was sure to be in a body bag.

  Jack was required to make yet another trip down to radiology. His hobbling was so pathetic that this time I went with him, offering my arm for support. The X-rays revealed a fractured ankle. The intern said it would have to be set or Jack could risk permanent injury.

  While Jack was helped onto a gurney and wheeled into the OR to get his ankle set, I repaired to the waiting room.

  At Jack’s request, I called Babs at her parents’ place. Her mother answered.

  “Is Barbara in?” I asked.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “Miles Raymond. Jack’s best man.”

  “Just a moment,” was her brisk reply.

  Babs came quickly to the phone. There was a frostiness in her voice, so instead of glad-handing her, I got right down to the business at hand.

  “Hi, Barbara, it’s Miles. Jack and I had a minor car accident.”

  “What?” she shrieked.

  “It’s nothing to worry about. Jack’s a little banged up, but we’re going to be up there in a few hours, so don’t worry.”

  I could sense her unease on the other end. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “He broke his ankle.” I paused. “And his nose. And fractured a rib. Plus, one side of his face is a little mangled where …”—I glanced up at the ceiling, hoping the good Lord wouldn’t cast a lightning bolt down at me—“ … he hit the windshield.”

  “Is he all right?” she asked, practically frantic with concern.

  “He’s fine,” I said coolly.

  “Is he there? Put him on.”

  “He’s in the OR getting his ankle set. He doesn’t want you to worry.”

  “Miles?”

  “Look,” I chopped her off. “I’ve got to get going. We’ll see you soon.” I hung up, leaving Babs stranded with a gallery of lurid images.