Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Road trip!” Jack interrupted excitedly. “I am all in, brother. I am all in.”

  “But there’s more to the plan.”

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  I sipped my wine. “So, my mother’s very unhappy in Las Villas de Muerte”–our moniker for her assisted-living facility–“down there in Carlsbad.”

  “Yeah, that visit last month was sad, man. Sad. God, I hope we don’t end up like that.”

  “Okay, well, I have to hear about it every day. I did the best I could after her congestive heart failure almost killed her, but even I have to admit that’s no life for anyone. Anyway, she wants to move back to Wisconsin to live with her sister. Her sister needs the money, and my mother could use a little more of the home-cooking touch, if you know what I mean.” I took a sip of wine to fortify myself. “Plus, the whole thing is draining me cash-flow wise. Not that I mind, but…. So, I was thinking, I don’t like to fly, my mother can’t fly in her condition, if we rented one of those handicapped vans, drove to the Willamette, gave my mother one last big send-off, then drove her to Wisconsin and dropped her off at her sister’s… Anyway, that’s the plan.”

  “Dude.” I could see Jack’s eyes bugging out. “Your mom’s a…”

  “Hold on,” I chopped him off. “I know it sounds wack, but bear with me. My mom’s got a favorite nurse–a little Filipina named Joy. I’ve sort of floated the possibility of her accompanying my mother on such a trip. And she’s totally willing. Especially for the cash I was offering.”

  Jack slurped whatever alcoholic beverage he was drinking. “I’m still listening.”

  “Five days to the Willamette Valley. Three for the festival. Two-day blitzkrieg to Wisconsin, drop my mom off at her sister’s with Joy who’ll oversee the transition, I get hammered, pop some Vicodin, and you get me on that flight back to LA. We have a great time, I give my mother this gift of being with her sister and liberating her from that depressing assisted-living facility. Plus, I get her out of my hair, get her expenses down to a more manageable number before she bankrupts me–the woman will not go down. What do you say? I know it sounds like I’m a little twisted right now–and I’m getting there–but I think it could be fun.”

  “I don’t know, man. Your mom’s in pretty bad shape, dude.”

  “I know, but I know how to handle her. Hand her a glass of wine and she’s putty. Remember, I was the one who had to take care of her and get her into Las Villas after my little brother ripped her off. Plus, she’s going to have 24/7 with the highly trained Filipina caretaker. But I can’t do all the driving. I cannot do this without you!” No response. “Jack? You want to be my co-pilot? Make some coin? That’s my offer.”

  “I’m trying to wrap my head around this,” he said. “Why don’t you just FedEx her or something? Ground rate. Should be cheaper.”

  I laughed at the image. “Ten grand. Hard cold. Post-tax. The finest restaurants. Five-star hotels. And, of course, all expenses paid. We’ll have a blast.”

  “You’re fucking nuts,” he laughed.

  “Not exactly breaking news. No, honestly, Jack, this is for my mom. She’s really miserable in that place. And I’ve got the means now to make her potentially happy. It’ll be good for my soul.”

  Jack was easing into the possibility, lubricating the path with cheap wine, or rotgut vodka. I knew ultimately the money would sway him. “The Filipina can totally handle your mom?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen her transfer Mom from her wheelchair into a car. Chick’s strong, man. She does this for a living for Christ’s sake!”

  “Ten grand?” Jack asked, as if to be sure.

  “Yeah! Jesus! How many times do I have to say it? Forget the salvation of my soul for a second. It’s going to save me money in the long run because it’s going to be cheaper for my mom to be with her sister. I just got to fucking get her there.”

  There was a pause. I don’t know if it was the booze speaking or if he just wanted to escape his abject life, but he spoke with unbridled exuberance, “All right, dude, let’s do it. Let’s get Phyllis to Wisconsin.”

  There was a familiar loud rap at the door. “Hey, Jackson, there’s someone knocking. I think it’s my publicist. Can I call you back?”

  “Your publicist,” he said sarcastically. “You crack me up, Homes. All right, call me back.” He hung up.

  Whoever it was knocked again, this time more sharply. “Who is it?” I called out.

  “Marcie! Are you decent?”

  Before I could respond, she barged in. It struck me for some reason that she was most likely lesbian, but the thought of some pretty young thing going down on her made my jittery stomach retch.

  She pulled up a chair next to the bed and slouched her corpulence into it.

  “Jesus, Marcie,” I said, quickly pulling my complimentary robe over my exposed groin. I muted the volume on the TV. The sound of the crashing waves filtered in through billowy curtains covering the sliding glass door. Marcie was wearing some sort of sweater-like poncho over a blouse and a skirt that mercifully ended below the knees. But even then one still got an eyeful of the vast network of varicose veins that road-mapped her calves. “What’s up?”

  She sniffed the air like a narcotics dog and said, “What’s that smell?”

  “Sex. And a lot of it,” I retorted, just to needle her.

  “Oh.” She glanced circumspectly at the monstrous glass of wine in my hand and said, “Aren’t you starting a little early?”

  “I’m on vacation,” I said, holding up my glass in a toast to her sneering presence.

  She shook her head wordlessly. Out of a satchel she produced a Mac-Book and pried it open. “Do you want to see yourself last night on YouTube?”

  Depression surged in and ruined my mood. “No, Marcie, I don’t.”

  She shook her head again in overt disapprobation. “I can’t decide if it’s good or bad publicity.”

  “I heard it was pretty damn funny.”

  “You were funny, Miles. But, did you have to outdo yourself with the spit bucket? I sincerely hope that’s a one-off.”

  “You heard that crowd, Marcie. They were going to riot if I didn’t reenact that stupid scene for them! You said just be yourself, so I was. Fucking wish I hadn’t written it.”

  “Well, I’m going to write it off as being caught up in the moment,” she said, closing her laptop, adding admonishingly, “and hope it doesn’t happen again.”

  “So, what have you got for me?”

  “I’ve got a wine festival in Santa Clarita….”

  “Screw that,” I chopped her off. “Santa Clarita Wine Festival. That sounds like an oxymoron. What do they want me to do? Sit in a booth all day and sign books. Screw that, Marcie. It’s a bastion of John Birchers out there.” It was exhilarating to be in the position to turn offers down.

  “It’s five thousand.”

  “I don’t need five grand that bad. Forget it. What else?”

  “This high-end cruise line wants you to be their enrichment lecturer.”

  “What high-end cruise line?”

  “Silverseas Cruises. Ever heard of it?”

  “No.”

  She passed me a brochure. I leafed through it. Looked pretty high-end. “Only 300 passengers. One-to-one crew-to-passenger ratio. Thirty wines free, which might intrigue you.” I kept paging through it. It looked mostly like rich retirees sailing off into the sunset.

  I raised my voice to a histrionic level: “Silverseas Cruise! Free morphine drip! Burial at sea! 24-hour Medevac to nearest ER! The last cruise you’ll ever take for more reasons than one!”

  She laughed, pausing to inject a little sense of humor in her usually splenetic temperament. “This one might do you a world of good, Miles.” She adjusted her reading glasses and read from her handwritten notes: “Let’s see, it starts out of San Pedro and goes all the way down the coast of Mexico, stopping for golf along the way–Cabo, Mazatlán, Acapulco, Costa Rica–then it passes through the Panama Canal, sail
s all the way to Ft. Lauderdale where they’ll fly you business class back to LA.”

  “Business class!” I shouted, divalike. “Fuck that! I’m Miles Raymond. Author of Shameless.”

  She pointed a finger at the glass of wine resting on my stomach. “You’ve got to slow down, Miles. I’m sure I can negotiate it up to first if that’s a deal-breaker for you. Fourteen days. All you have to do is screen the movie, tell a few choice anecdotes, conduct a wine tasting….”

  “Drink from the spit bucket.”

  “No, not drink from the spit bucket, but hobnob friendily with some very wealthy people.”

  “Friendily,” I scoffed. “That’s not a word, Marcie. The correct word is friend-li-ly.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Where’d you go to college?”

  “Vassar.”

  “Vassar? That’s a great school, or so I heard.” I paused and took a sip of wine. “Do you know a good lawyer?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Because I think you have an ironclad case to sue for a refund on your tuition. Then you could afford the cruise. Or at least the weekend in Santa Clarita you’re hankering for.”

  “Ha. Ha.”

  “Marcie, facetiousness aside, you know I have trouble boarding jetliners. Remember I told you I once had to be deplaned in Rapid City, South Dakota, off that 50-seater Canadian Air. That panic attack cost me $2,500 because I had to drive home. Forget it. I told you, anything involving flying is not in the cards for me.”

  “Miles,” she said in an exasperated tone, “you’re going to have to get over your aerophobia if you want to take advantage of these opportunities I’m bringing you. This is a lot of money you’re turning down. This is your fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “What do you want me to do? I’ve tried Biofeedback. Total waste of money. Mountebanks! I spent a grand on a series of DVDs from some airline captain and that didn’t do shit. I’ve tried meditation, medication, even mediation. I just get claustrophobic on a plane. Have you ever had a panic attack where you thought a giant octopus was planted on your chest and wouldn’t relinquish its grip?” I didn’t want to launch into the story of the time I had to be hospitalized because I hypochondriacally believed I was in the throes of a heart attack because the story was too involved and I had told it too many times and it was starting to sound apocryphal.

  “Heck,” she said, the publicist in her anxious to find a solution to everything, “I’ll meet you in Florida and fly back with you and hold your hand. I’ll go on the damn cruise with you if you want. It’s thirty thousand a person, Miles! They’re putting you up in one of their better suites, offering a ten thousand honorarium, view of the ocean….”

  The thought of spending two weeks with Marcie on a Mexico/Central America cruise made my eyes bulge a little. Sure, two weeks playing golf and basking in the sun on a luxury boat did sound tempting. But then I worried that it would just turn into another one of those boozy affairs that go on indefinitely. “I don’t know, Marcie, I’ll think about it.”

  “As the enrichment lecturer you might meet that wealthy woman you’ve been looking for.”

  I scoffed. “Love’s not in the offing for me, Marcie. Once these women get past the allure of the whole Shameless phenomenon, they discover this insecure guy who can’t fly, is afflicted with frequent panic attacks, drinks too much, and is an inveterate commitment-phobe. I’m just too messed up.”

  “A woman would do you a world of good,” she advised.

  I took a sip of my wine and grew reflective. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But Victoria just set the bar too high,” I finished wistfully.

  “You’ve got to move on, Miles.”

  “I know, I know. Let’s drop it.”

  “Okay, so anyway,” she said, turning to other matters. “We’ve got the tasting at The Wine House next Wednesday, a second faculty dinner at your alma mater UCSD, then the Willamette Valley event the following week…”

  I cut her off. “There’s been a change of plan.”

  She looked up from her notes with consternation. “What? You can’t cancel, Miles. They’ve already done all this publicity around your coming and everything!”

  “Celebrities cancel all the time, Marcie,” I said, with deliberate indifference just to rile her and get her jowls shaking.

  She stiffened. “Jesus, Miles, you’re going to give me a damn heart attack!”

  “I’m going, Marcie, okay? Relax. Okay?”

  “So, what’s the change of plans?” she asked warily.

  I told her the change of plans.

  Her eyeballs bulged out like sprung headlights after a head-on collision. “Let me get this straight. You’re trading in a nice Amtrak trip, sleeper car, everything I arranged for you, to what? Rent some handicapped van? Pile in Jack”–she said it affectedly in a nasty way with a shake of the head–“your stroke-addled mother, who’s in a wheelchair, and… a… Filipina caretaker?”

  “And my mother’s precious Yorkie, if I can get him back.”

  Marcie laughed so long and loud, when she was done her face looked like Baked Alaska with two maraschino cherries for eyes. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Marcie? I didn’t know you used the F-word.”

  “Unlike you, I save it for when it’s really meaningful.”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me if I’m out of my mind?” I raised my nearly-empty sommelier’s glass. “Could you bring me that bottle?” I said.

  Marcie ignored my request. Instead, she reached for the hotel phone and dialed room service. “I’d like to get some eggs, bacon and toast and coffee up here ASAP,” she said brusquely to whomever was on the other end of the line.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said to Marcie.

  “You need to get something in your stomach, Miles,” the mother in her admonished, jabbing a finger in the air at me. “And you need to fucking rethink this cockamamie trip of yours.”

  “I need to get out, Marcie. And I want to do this for my poor mother.”

  At the mention of my mother she cut short her remonstrations about my “cockamamie” trip. “So, you’ll still do the event I set up at Justin Winery?”

  “Absolutely. It’s on the itinerary.” I tipped my head back and chugged the rest of the wine in the glass as she, a teetotaler, looked on, aghast.

  Marcie, still shaking her head, rose cumbrously from her chair and left. I got out my iPhone and logged onto the Net. Went to YouTube, typed in my name. And there it was: my boozy emcee speech, complete with my pouring a spit bucket over my head and the audience erupting into laughter. It was as if I were looking at a ghost of myself. Total mortification descended on me; more wine assuaged me.

  chapter 3

  It was night when I angled off the freeway at Sunset Boulevard and headed toward my house, feeling weary after the three-day debauch at the World of Pinot Noir. I still lived in the same rent-controlled house on 12th Street in Santa Monica. Didn’t seem there was any reason to move. I’m not big on cars or real estate. And even with a little money in the bank and the knowledge that property ownership was smart–tax write-offs and all that responsible financial stuff that artists never pay attention to–I wasn’t known for doing the prudent thing when it came to managing my finances.

  Mail had piled up in my too-small mailbox. A quick perusal revealed a plethora of wine-related brochures and a pair of manila envelopes from my publishing agent. I tore open those first, smelling money. As I suspected, both contained checks. One was payment on a foreign sale of my book and the other contained yet another royalty check from my American publisher. Five years ago I would have fainted on the spot. Or, at the very least, knelt on the floor and invoked the Almighty, even if I had lost faith in Him over the past years. Now, it was a deluge. Money and women. Feast or famine. Beast or gamine–stupid little ditties were springing up in my head I was so giddy with my new good fortune.

  My cell rang just as I came in the door and tossed my mail aside. “Hi, Mom,” I said
in a cheery voice, as I made my way into the kitchen and uncorked another amazing artisanal bottle of Pinot–that one of the girls had left on the credenza in Shell Beach–while balancing the cell between ear and shoulder.

  “Hi, Miles,” she said. “I’m in bed.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “How’re you feeling today?”

  “Oh,” she said in her occasional singsongy voice, “okay, I guess.”

  I poured a glass of wine, reversed back into the living room and stretched out on my new Eames replica couch, a plush tuck-and-roll leather version that replaced the ghastly 20-year-old IKEA one where the polyester batting flared out of like disdainful tongues. “Did you get your glass of wine tonight?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Joy was good to me.”

  “Well, that’s good, because I know you didn’t like that other girl, what was her name?”

  “Dolores. She’s no good,” my mother said.

  “Hey, Mom, have you spoken to your sister lately?”

  “Oh, yes, I speak to her every night.”

  “Well, you know we’ve talked about the possibility of moving you out to Sheboygan.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, what if I told you I think I can make it a reality?”

  “Oh, don’t joke me, Miles.”

  “I’m not joking you, Mom. I know you’re not happy at Las Villas. I know you blame me for putting you there. Even though you’re the one who had the stroke, not me.”

  “I know. I’m such a burden.” She fell into uncontrollable blubbering. Ever since the massive stroke she had the tendency to break into tears at the most trifling of things.

  “Don’t cry, Mom. I can’t handle that, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, sniffling.

  “So, here’s the deal: I’m invited to be the master of ceremonies at this big wine festival in Oregon. You know I don’t like to fly, so I’m driving.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You’ll get killed!” She also, at any mention of travel or change in the lives of her sons and caretakers, waxed maniacally paranoid that we were fated to die and leave her all alone, abandoned to a tyrannical system of truculent nurses who didn’t give a “god damn” about her welfare.