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I shuffled in place, tapped my foot with annoyance, glanced frequently at my watch, felt my phone buzzing incessantly in my pants pocket, all the while plagued by the image of an irate Melina racing up the freeway in her new Lexus to intercept us, reclaim Snapper, and harangue me into infamy. Hell, call the cops and have me arrested for grand larceny!
“Come on, Mom, come on,” I exhorted. “Time’s a wastin’.”
“I’m coming.”
I heard her transfer herself back into the wheelchair and I turned to her. “Are you excited?”
“Oh, yes,” she said.
I hustled around behind her, grabbed the steering handles and pushed her toward the door.
She threw me an alarmed backward look. “Do you have my clothes?”
“Yes. Joy bought you all new duds.”
“Do you have my pills?”
“Yes.” We were out in the hallway now and rounding the corner by the nurse’s station.
“Did you get Snapper?”
“Oh, yes, we got Snapper.”
“Oh, that’s such good news,” she said, relief washing over her.
The head nurse, Yvonne, a stout woman of Eastern European descent, emerged unexpectedly from one of the patients’ suites and strode toward us. She stopped when she saw us approaching, so I brought my mother and myself to a halt so as not to arouse her suspicions.
“Going upstairs for lunch?” Yvonne asked, glancing at her watch. “It’s a little early.”
“No, my son’s taking me to Wisconsin, you son of a bitch!” my mother said in a tone of righteous indignation.
From behind her, I shook my head emphatically no. “We’re going out to eat. She’s not in a good mood.”
“Evidently,” Yvonne said, her occupationally impervious bearing the only obstacle between my mother’s freedom and re-incarceration in Las Villas de Muerte.
“And,” I added, sub rosa, “talk about maybe relocating her somewhere else.”
Yvonne nodded, as if my words had vouchsafed a ray of sunshine to her depressing job. “That’s a good idea,” she said compassionately, moving around us and on to some other pressing obligation.
As she went past, my mother bellowed, “Screw you and your damn home! Your food tastes like crap!”
“All right, Mom, cool it. Or I’m going to wheel you back into that room with that shitcan next to your bed and never visit you again.”
That shut her up. She flopped her favorite blue Gilligan’s Island hat on her head and braced for the new beginning ahead.
I pushed my mother forward. Halfway to the elevator I glanced back over my shoulder and glimpsed a circumspect Yvonne standing imperiously, broad and mammoth as a linebacker, arms stapled against her chest, glowering at us.
Jack and Joy had the side door open and the pebbled ramp on the low-rise floor extended out to the sidewalk when I finally made it out of the facility, the iPhone still buzzing in my pocket like a whoopee cushion. Hurrying, I pushed my mother up and in and backed her where a seat normally would be positioned and set the hand locks. Snapper leapt up into her lap and my mother and the impish Yorkie fell into a bawling and tongue-licking reunion.
Jack and I climbed into the front and Jack turned the engine over and started off. He glanced back at my mother. “Hi, Mrs. Raymond. Remember me? Jack.”
“Jack? How are you?”
“Excellent. We’re going to drink a lot of good wine.”
“Oh, I hope so,” my mother said.
Jack laughed and steered us toward the blessed liberation of the interstate.
I looked into the back. My mother, after mawkishly reacquainting herself with her dog, finally noticed Joy sitting next to her and broke into exultations of happiness.
“Oh, Joy, I’m so glad you’re here. I didn’t think you would make it.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Raymond,” Joy said in her soft, slightly Tagalog-accented voice. “I’m here.”
“Oh, I’m so glad to be out of that place,” my mother blubbered from the back.
“We’re going on a vacation, Mom.”
She crooked her arthritic index finger at the ceiling as she was wont to do and said through squinted, teary eyes, “I’m so happy.”
“I don’t want you to be crying all the time. It’s going to be a long trip if that’s all you do. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, stifling her tears.
I leaned toward Jack and whispered, “I wouldn’t put it past that hot-blooded Brazilian to call the cops on us. So, we’ve got to motor. Although I doubt the cops would put out an APB on a dognapper, especially one she just finished having sex with.”
“How do the cops know what we’re driving?” Jack said.
“Good point. I’m a little discombobulated,” I said. “Inauspicious start to the day, if you know what I mean.”
“Amen, brother, amen. Why don’t you just call her and tell her what the deal is?”
“Are you kidding? She’s probably over at Las Villas right now telling the head nurse the story. I mean, I hope she’s just resigned to the fact that it’s my mother’s dog and is only storming around in her house. I hope!”
“People get pretty emotional about their pets,” Jack countered.
“Yeah, I know.” I gave another backward glance to my mother. She was still kissing and hugging Snapper.
A surge of relief suffused me as we arced back over the curving onramp onto I-5 and burned rubber north. I rooted an envelope thick with twenty-dollar bills out of the glove compartment and reached it back to Joy who eyed me questioningly. “As promised. One week, in full, your plane ticket and something a little extra, you know, for personal expenses and stuff.” She nodded, then slipped the envelope into her purse. “And thanks again for agreeing to come, Joy.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Raymond.”
“And don’t call me Mr. Raymond. I’m not as old as your dad.”
My mother took notice of the envelope. “How much are you paying her?”
“None of your business, Mom.”
“Whatever it is, it’s too much,” the girl born in the Great Depression cried.
“Whatever it is, it’s not enough.” I locked eyes with Joy and mouthed: Don’t listen to her.
Jack steered the car into the middle lane. I rummaged under the front seat, coming up with the ‘07 Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir Goosepen I had already uncorked and stowed, filled two plastic cups and handed one discreetly to Jack. “Let’s keep it exactly at the speed limit, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And let’s keep our voices down. My mother may be an invalid, but she’s still sentient.”
“I am not an invalid!” my mother spoke from the back over the roar of the engine.
“We weren’t talking about you, Mom.”
“Yes, you were!”
I lowered my voice. “See what I mean. And if she asks you what’s in that cup, you say it’s water, or she’s going to want some.”
Jack nodded, sipped the Goosepen and smacked his lips. “Man, you’ve got the good stuff.”
“This is awesome juice. Teeth-blackening. Huge mouthfeel. I’m getting excited.”
“Can’t wait until we get up to Oregon. That’s going to be fun.”
I smiled. “Christ, it feels good to be underway, doesn’t it?”
“Hallelujah,” Jack said, toasting me.
“How did you get Melina to give you Snapper?” my mom asked from the back.
I turned around and faced her. Snapper was curled up in her lap, panting contentedly. I decided that it had been the right thing to do, regardless of the perfidious methodology. “It wasn’t easy, Mom.”
“Did you have to give her money, too?”
“No, I gave her something better than that,” I said, the wine rekindling a return to my former humorous self.
“What was that?” my mother wanted to know.
“I promised I would give her a sperm donation. She wants to have kids and my seed is in high demand right now.”
Jack, also laughing, happy to see that my previous dyspepsia had been unknotted into the old Miles Raymond he knew, kept the Rampvan at the speed limit. And the sippy cup never far from his lips.
As we shifted from the 5 to the 405 and continued to blaze a northerly trail, Joy turned her attention to my mother and was helping her with her San Diego Union crossword puzzle. Snapper had apparently already forgotten about Melina and his Alpine chalet and blood sausages, or whatever she spoiled him with, and had fallen asleep. Jack and I, cast at last on a river of sanguinity, slowly drank.
chapter 5
We rode through LA as the vast city hummed with cars and their harried drivers scurried helter-skelter in every direction to make a living, or a name, for themselves. It was refreshing not to get off at the 10 Freeway and be heading back to Santa Monica and my own minefield of worries.
Jack and I kept our sippy cups half full. Somewhere inside me I realized we were rolling the dice, but both of us had built up such a tolerance to the grape we needed the medicating libations to maintain our sangfroid. As long as we kept it under control I believed we could manage it. And there was no way I was going to get Jack or myself to go cold turkey on the trip.
My mother’s voice piped up from the back. “What’re you drinking up there, Miles?”
“Just a little water, Mom.”
“Oh, that’s a lot of horse muffins,” she retorted. “I bet it’s wine.”
“Okay, just a little, uh, Pinot. Jack and I have had a long morning,” I said in a rising tone, over the roar of the engine.
“Can I have a glass of wine, please?”
“Mom, you have to wait till we get to Buellton. We have a nice dinner planned for you. You’ll get two glasses of the finest Chardonnay”–her favorite variety and the only one she would ever drink–“I don’t want you passing out on me, okay?”
“I’m not going to pass out,” she bristled.
“Let’s wait until Buellton.”
“It’s not fair that you get wine and I don’t.”
“Mom, in an hour, we’ll be at the Marriott and I’ll open you the finest Chardonnay and I’ll get you straightened out, okay?”
“It’s five o’clock.” She was a five o’clock drinker like her first-born, Hank. She never took a drop before five, but right on the dot, she had a glass, then, until her stroke, quite a few more.
“I know it’s five, Mom, but now that you’re out of Las Villas the imbibition rules have changed. We may go wine tasting in the morning, we may not start until late. We’re on a whole new schedule now.”
“I’m nervous.”
I turned and looked her squarely in the eyes, hoping to dispel her apprehensions. “Jack, Joy, and I are going to take care of you, okay?”
“Okay,” she demurred. “You promise?”
“Yes.”
“Phyllis,” Jack roared. “You’re in good hands.”
I shot Jack a look as if to say, Let me handle this.
I turned back to my querulous mother. “When we get up there, we’ll get freshened up, and hustle you out to dinner ASAP.”
“That’s good news. You promise?”
“I promise. I don’t want you coming down with the vapors.”
My mother chuckled at the word vapors. “Oh, I won’t,” she said. “I don’t get depressed like you, Miles.”
“No one does.” To quiet my mother I produced a CD folder from the drinks console and selected Harry Belafonte’s Greatest Hits, slipped it into the CD player and adjusted the volume. At the sound of Belafonte’s mellifluous voice, and the first of his sappy hits, I watched my mother’s reaction. When she heard her favorite musician start singing his signature track, “The Banana Boat Song,” she tapped her index finger against an imaginary object and said, “Oh, Harry. He was fantastic.”
“Are you happy, Mom?”
Her eyes pinched closed and it looked like she was going to start crying again. “This is the best day of my life.”
As the lyrics came in over the melody, Jack sang boisterously along, his voice a shockingly beautiful baritone:
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Day, me say day, me say day, me say day
Me say day, me say day-o
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Work all night on a drink of rum
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Stack banana till de mornin’ come
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Come, mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Come, mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
When the chorus started up, Jack raised his voice and sang in a booming tone, turning frequently to serenade my enchanted mother:
Lift six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
My mother broke into song only when Belafonte sang, “Daylight come and me wan’ go home.” There was something sad in the way she croakily harmonized with Harry’s dulcet crooning, as if “The Banana Boat Song” was going to become the anthem for the last journey of her life.
In the smog-choked Valley, we merged onto the 101 and continued north in the direction of Santa Barbara, moving against the prevailing traffic and making good time. The sun began to bend off to the west and the blue sky was striated with apricot-colored clouds that looked like gigantic pennants suspended in deep space.
“Are you going to call Maya when we get up there?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She was kind of cold to me on the phone the last time I spoke with her. I guess when the movie came out I sort of went off and did my own thing and… Plus, she’s not going to move to LA because she’s got her own little boutique winery thing going, and I’m certainly not going to move up there because all I’d do is get drunk and pick up groupies at the Hitching Post.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Jack asked.
I smirked and shook my head. “I’m sure it’d get old real fast. Then, in no time, I would become a local joke. I’m trying to move on, Jackson. I’m trying to shed this past, but it keeps pulling me down.”
Jack, no doubt eager to discourage my introspection, tacked: “So, Terra’s really doing lap dances in Reno?”
“That’s what I gleaned, yeah. You drove her into a life of prostitution, Jackson.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You had that girl’s head turned totally around during that crazy week.”
“She had my head turned totally around. I almost blew off the wedding.”
“Which, in retrospect, might have been the best thing that could have happened to you.”
“But then I wouldn’t have had Byron,” he said, a little wistfully.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” my mother barked from the back.
“All right, Mom,” I said. “We’ll take the next exit.” I turned to Jack: “This is going to be a pretty frequent occurrence. She takes some powerful diuretics for her edema. Just so you know.”
“That’s cool,” Jack said. “If Phyllis’s got to go, she’s got to go.” He turned around and, his mood lifted by the wine he’d been sipping, said to my mother over the music. “All right, Phyllis. Pit-stop coming up. Time to rinse a kidney.”
In Ventura, I directed Jack to a turnoff I was familiar with and he braked at a gas station mere yards from the off-ramp. Joy slid open the side door and, after I had pulled the ramp out from the undercarriage, wheeled my mother out. Snapper leapt out of the van and took off running.
“Snapper! Snapper!” my mother screamed. “Get back here!”
Snapper, hearing her familiar voice, came to a sliding stop, lifted his leg and urinated on the tire of a parked car, and then sprinted back, panting excitedly.
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br /> My mother turned to Joy and reproached her. “You can’t let him out like that. He has to be on his leash.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Raymond.”
“Mom, it wasn’t her fault. She was hired to take care of you, not Snapper.”
“He could have died,” she cried. Snapper was now back in the van with the door closed and his bladder blissfully relieved.
“Well, everything’s fine now. Just relax, Mom, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry, Joy.”
Joy, ever patient, wheeled my mother off in search of the service station’s bathroom.
I maneuvered the van next to one of the pumps and took the pit-stop opportunity to top off the tank. Jack had wandered off and lit a cigarette, a nasty habit he had broken at Babs’s behest, but now was back to chipping away at.
As I refueled, I noticed Joy emerging from the bathroom and discreetly lighting a joint. She took a couple puffs off it, then disappeared back inside the bathroom. Once we had done our business and sated our various vices, we all congregated back in the van and continued up the 101 in the direction of the Santa Ynez Valley.
The sky colored a darker shade of blue as we passed through Santa Barbara and drew closer to the destination of our journey’s first leg. Hugging the 101, and directly off to our left, the immense Pacific, with its mottled whitecaps, took on the appearance of crumpled tin foil struck by bright light. Eventually, the 101 curved away from the ocean and, just before the town of Buellton, we bore through the same tunnel the characters had in the movie.
“Life imitates art,” I mused to Jack.
“I hope not,” Jack said, drawing laughter from me.
As we crested the Santa Ynez Mountains and coasted the final few miles toward Buellton, night was just starting to descend. As always, whenever I came to pay a visit, the valley, with its beautiful rolling hills and unpolluted skies and swaths of vineyards, brought me a certain serenity.
Jack pulled into the Marriott, which fronts the 101, and I got out to check in. The clerk at the reception desk recognized my name and was all atwitter. On the desk were stacks of the Shameless wine map, a tourists’ guide to many of the locations in the movie. The local chamber of commerce had quickly pounced on its notoriety in a shameless run of greedy self-promotion. The young, blushing woman assigned us two adjacent rooms on the top floor. I went back out to the Rampvan. The air bore a slight chill now and I was feeling refreshed, looking forward to dinner and wine at the Hitching Post.