Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “So, how did she almost burn the house down?” Jack said.

  “Do you want to tell the story, Mom?”

  She shook her head.

  “She put this huge pot of oil on the stove to make fries, then she went into the family room and had a cocktail. Then, a couple more cocktails. The next thing you know the pot of oil had ignited and the whole kitchen was on fire. There was so much smoke we had to crawl out the front door on our hands and knees. Do you remember that, Mom?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I forgot about the oil.”

  “Mom, you burned down half the house because you were drunk.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. Then she looked at me with a pained expression. “Why would you say such a thing about your mother?”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “Besides. We got a whole new kitchen from the insurance.”

  Everyone laughed and that seemed to mollify the slight tension that had sprung up between mother and son.

  I put a hand on my mother’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I didn’t mean that, Mom,” I said in an undertone.

  “I was not drunk,” she said.

  “Okay, I said I’m sorry.”

  She held out her empty glass. “Can I have another glass? You made me upset.”

  Feeling guilty, I refilled her glass without doing battle with her. Joy glanced over circumspectly. Now, I felt doubly guilty and reached for my glass of ice water.

  As eight o’clock rolled around, a middle-aged woman with short-cropped hair and a friendly smile materialized at the table and reminded me it was close to time to go on.

  “All right, let’s rock-and-roll, it’s show time,” I said, animated by the wine.

  My mother had grown drowsy. She tried to inveigle “just a smidgen more” of Chardonnay, but I wouldn’t let her have it. It would have been unfair to Joy, who’d have to do bedtime with my mother half in the bag. I whispered to Joy that she should put my mother down and not bring her to the event because there would be more wine there, but that she was welcome to attend.

  Outside, the night sky was speckled spectacularly with stars. Cricket-song chirred loudly, making me realize just how far out in the country we were. Guests had started arriving en masse and the headlights on their luxury cars were blinding, spraying the vineyards and the various winery structures and lighting them up.

  Jack, Laura, Carmen, and I made our way over to the winery, laughing, cracking jokes.

  We entered the winery, laughing, our arms around one another like a foursome of college kids out on the town. It was the most capacious barrel room I had ever seen. In the tenebrous light its arched corridors seemed to stretch to infinity. There was a large anteroom with a movable rostrum set up for me to speak. The crowd was already near overflowing, all of them sipping wine they found at the three tasting stations set up for the event.

  The Justin PR person ushered me up to the podium. The guests, most of them wine club members who had ponied up $ 100 to sip Justin’s finest and hear me tell saucy anecdotes about Shameless, broke up their conversations, settled into the foldup chairs and directed their attention to the rostrum. The PR lady looked a little nervous. Had she seen the latest humiliating YouTube post? She took the microphone and spoke into it: “All right, everyone, we’re ready to begin.”

  The attendees collectively stopped their chatter and the room gradually fell silent.

  The PR lady cleared her throat. “Tonight, we have a special guest. I’m sure most of you have seen the movie Shameless, which has had such a tremendous impact on the wine industry.” There was a scattering of applause. “And although Justin doesn’t make a Pinot”–she turned and gave me a mock reproving look–“and although we do use a little Merlot in our Cabernet varietals just as they do in Bordeaux, we feel indebted to the man who finally wrote a novel that celebrated our passion for wine. So, without further ado, I offer you Miles Raymond.”

  As I walked to the rostrum, wineglass in hand, there was an explosion of applause. I already had them where I wanted them. I adjusted the mike. I looked down. There were Laura and Carmen and Jack seated in the front row. Laura was beaming up at me. Behind her, a sea of waiting faces. And I had nothing prepared!

  “Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. I really didn’t think anyone would show.” Laughter. I took a sip of wine to fortify myself. It weirdly animated me. “When I wrote Shameless, my life was shit. My mother–who is with us here at Justin, but in bed right now–had suffered a massive stroke. My younger brother brought her back home after a three-month stint in the hospital and then proceeded in just two years to gut her modest savings.” Audible groans. “I then had to leave Los Angeles and the film business to go down and care for her. It was the start of a brutal two years, during which time I weathered my agent’s dying of AIDS and my being divorced–deservedly–by a loving, supportive wife. Thus the character of Martin and his remorse over a wrecked marriage. Anyway, I finally crawled my way back to Santa Monica and my rent-controlled apartment, had to take in a roommate for the first time since college”–I shook my head to myself at the memory of yet another indignity–“and started writing.” I paused for another slurp of wine and barreled forward, the crowd growing blurrier and blurrier in my vision. “I wrote a novel that got me a new publishing agent. He submitted it and over the course of a year we accumulated about 70 rejection letters–thus Martin’s character of the budding author who can’t get published. Then, with no money, having tapped out all my friends, the wolves nipping at my heels, in a heightened state of anxiety, I wrote Shameless.” There was applause. “Wait a second. It gets worse before it gets better.” Nervous laughter followed as I regrouped. I raked my hair back off my forehead. “We went out with it to both film and publishing. The publishers hated it, wrote it off as an over-sexed screenplay.” There were some groans of discontent from the audience. “And the film world turned their noses up at it. They didn’t know what to make of it. Two guys go where? Do what? That’s not a movie. That’ll never be a movie!” The laughter resumed. “Finally, ten months after it had been submitted to him, Dmitri Anton, the director, read it and called his agent and said it was going to be his next film. My new agent got really excited. Everyone got really excited. It was leaked to the entertainment trade papers. But… it wasn’t his next movie. He went off to do something else. But the option money allowed me to breathe a little. Still, you know,” I said, pausing to take another sip of wine, “looking back, being broke and in debt with horrible credit, I learned a valuable lesson”–I found myself raising my voice like some Baptist preacher–“You can rise like Lazarus from the ashes of your despair and destitution!” I took another, this time, gulp of wine. I was being more personal than I had intended, but that was my wont, and my Achilles heel. “There’s an upside to bad credit, however.” I paused for comic effect. “You’re immune to identity theft.” Roaring laughter. “And there’s an upside to being so broke you can only afford the cheapest bottle of Merlot.” Another pregnant pause. “I got really expert at cunnilingus.” There was kind of a collective bemused response from the audience. “I was so destitute, I couldn’t afford prophylactics.” The cachinnation that followed was deafening. I looked down and Laura and Jack and Carmen were laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes. “How has my life changed? Well, I don’t have to drink cheap Merlot anymore. They probably wouldn’t sell it to me anyway after the damage I did to their industry.” More laughter. I was on a roll. “And the Pinot people owe me royalties!” Laughter now crescendoing. “But I’m not totally down on Merlot. Anyone out there with a bottle of ‘82 Pétrus–100 percent Merlot–I’ll quaff it like a sailor on shore leave.” The laughter was infectious now. It didn’t seem to matter what I said anymore. I was giving them what they wanted, surprised at my ability to turn it on without a script, completely extemporaneously. “Anyway, I could go on and on about my life before and after the book and movie, but I think I’ll turn it over to all of you, should you have any question
s.”

  A forest of hands shot up. The predictable queries came in a veritable avalanche. How long did it take me to write the book? “Ten years of drinking my way through the Santa Ynez Valley, nine weeks to write it up.” Reverberating laughter. Why did Martin have to steal from his mother? “In the book he was flat broke and wouldn’t have been able to go on the trip; plus, his mother was relatively well off. In the movie, she was middle-class and Martin had a job, so maybe it made him less sympathetic, I don’t know.” Was I happy with the movie? “Well, the movie won over three hundred and fifty citations and awards from various critics and awards organizations, and was a very faithful adaptation of my work–with a few necessary compromises–so, absolutely, I got lucky.” What are you going to do next? I finished my glass of wine. “I’m going to sign some books and then go back to my suite that the nice people of Justin gave me with my friend Jack–who was the inspiration for the character of Jake–and these two lovely women we met at Foxen today who agreed impromptu to join us.” Finally, in a rising tone: “I don’t know what they were thinking. Did they read the novel?!” Riotous, eye-watering laughter. Even Laura and Carmen were jackknifed over in their chairs.

  When it was over, the Justin PR lady led me to a table that had been set up in the cavernous barrel room and sat me down. My ears were still ringing from all the hilarity and applause. I asked her to bring me another glass of wine to gird myself for the book signing. The guests formed a line. It snaked all the way out the entrance and into the night.

  The signing got underway. I tried to personalize all the books by asking them a little about their lives, whom the book was for. They crowded in on me, peppered me with more questions. Spouses and girlfriends flirted degenerately. Some slipped me their business cards. Other people–vintners, people in the wine world–slipped me their business cards, inviting me to this high-end tasting or an event at their winery where I would be the guest speaker. Most of the cards would be in the wastebasket in the Sussex suite the next morning. Some that held promises of obscene appearance fees I would pass along to Marcie to ferret through.

  The book signing lasted an exhausting two hours. From time to time, as I grew more and more inebriated, I was asked to stand and take pictures with some of the attendees. Some women, uninhibited thanks to the liberal pours, unrepentantly groped me. One woman brushed her hand against my groin and told me where she was staying in Paso Robles, then passed me a business card with her cell number scrawled on it and implored me to call her anytime I was in town. Even though Laura was hovering protectively over me and had been introduced as the woman I had brought to Justin!

  When it was over and the crowd had filtered out, my hand was cramped and I was feeling a little lightheaded. All who remained were a few people from Justin, the incandescently lovely Laura, Carmen and the thousand kilowatt-smiling Jack, lit up on wine like a Roman candle. I surmised the event had been a success, but it had taken a toll on me and I histrionically slumped forward.

  “Are you okay, Miles?” Laura asked, hooking an arm around my neck.

  “Get me the fuck out of here.” I looked up. “I’m fine. These events just take it out of me.”

  I said my goodbyes to the organizers and the people who had helped put the event on, and then the four of us weaved our way back to the Sussex suite. Jack had cadged some more bottles of Isosceles from the vintner and proceeded to open one the moment we bustled into the suite. The windows had been left open and a slight chill invaded the room. I squatted down in front of the stone fireplace and lit a fire that was already set up with starter paper and split logs of oak. I shuttered the windows and sat down wearily on the couch next to Laura. As if she couldn’t restrain herself, as if her passion for me had been building up in her all day and had reached an apotheosis at the event, she leaned over and kissed me ardently. I kissed her back. With the relief of the evening’s being over I just melted into her like emollient equatorial waters.

  Jack poured everyone glasses of wine. The collective mood was borderline euphoric: the sylvan locale, the event, my well-received talk–one of which I had no recollection!–the sumptuous wine, all free of charge. I was delighted to see everyone so elated. As the fire grew into a warming blaze that flickered lambently over everyone’s faces, the three of them reminisced over the things I had said, laughing at lines they remembered and I didn’t. These events were always a blur to me in retrospect. Little whitewater rafting trips on acid.

  “Well,” I interjected at one point, “at least I didn’t drink from the spit bucket.” And they all laughed. “But they probably wanted me to.”

  “Is that true,” Laura asked, “that you once drank from the spit bucket?”

  “It is true. It was exaggerated in the movie and it didn’t happen in a tasting room,” I lied, “but rather at a private tasting. The oenophiles were pretty appalled, but they joked about it for a long time after so I thought, that’s got to go into the book. And I’m glad it made it into the movie. It gets a huge laugh. I love making people laugh. Tragedy qua tragedy can be such a downer. But if you can meld tragedy with comedy, I think that’s the secret. Tragedy is leavened and mitigated by comedy. And comedy underscored with tragedy makes it less inane.”

  Laura’s and Carmen’s expressions grew thoughtful as I digressed, per my wont, into my intellectual analytical mode. But when I glanced at Jack I saw only a look of unmitigated consternation. He was slowly shaking his head. I smiled back at him. I was so loaded on wine my smile was difficult for him to accurately interpret. Laura and Carmen didn’t know what to make of our facial signals.

  Jack unlocked his eyes from mine and moved his hand to Carmen’s thigh. She smiled up at the big guy, semaphoring he wouldn’t be disappointed. Laura still had her arm clamped around my neck and was leaning her head against my shoulder. A strange thought flared in my besotted brain: I’ll ask her to marry me and move out to LA. She was beautiful–I loved brunettes–educated, cosmopolitan. Could I do any better? Best not to propose when drunk, I cautioned myself, but I was suddenly so assailed by the loneliness of all the one-night stands, I really did want to marry her on the spot. I exhorted myself to pull it together, not to go down that mawkish road, think carefully of what would be lying in wait for me the next morning when I went, “Huh? What? Did I say that?”

  Holding Carmen’s hand in his bearish paw, Jack stood and said, “We’re going to take a walk. Smell the vines.” Carmen rose with him.

  “Euphemisms aren’t necessary, Jackson.”

  He and Carmen both laughed. Christ, I thought, she’s almost as tall as him. Thank God they’re not going to be in the adjoining room!

  “See you in the morning,” I said, waving.

  Jack winked at me and then they were gone, their shoes crunching on the gravel outside.

  Laura and I started making out. Between Lethean kisses she said, “You were really funny tonight, Miles.”

  “I was?” I said, pretending not to know.

  “Really funny,” she said. “But all those women coming on to you.” She shook her head. “They have no, how do you say…”

  “Conscience.”

  “No tienen vergüenza. Sí.”

  I kissed her briefly. “God, I love it when you speak that Catalan Spanish. It’s so sexy.”

  She blushed, then said, “How does that make you feel? All those women?”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t mean anything to me, Laura. I mean, it’s flattering. But, do any of them really want to get to know me? Or do they just want to go on this little ephemeral celebrity ride, then dump me when it’s over? I’m just happy to be here with you. I’m happy that you and Carmen came up.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, kissing her softly, but meaningfully.

  “I can’t believe I met you. It’s so unreal I’m sitting here in this beautiful place with the author of Shameless.”

  “I’m just a guy who got lucky,” I said, trying to infuse some modesty into the dynamic.
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br />   “No, you’re not, Miles, you’re a genius.”

  “Oh no, not the G word,” I said. “I’ll never write another book. Besides, I’m doubly lucky. Look at you.”

  She laughed, then pulled me toward her and lashed her lips to mine. I kissed her back. Her lips were soft and full. Her ardor was palpable. When her hand groped my thigh I instinctively thought it was time to refresh our glasses. I disentangled myself from her and said, “I’m going to go to the bathroom, then open another bottle.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I navigated an oblique path to the bathroom. I took a pee, shook a V out of its vial, bit off only half, ground it up and moved it under my tongue for quicker absorption. We were going to be having sex–and soon–and given how much wine I had consumed, I was anxious not to disappoint. Besides, I had a reputation to uphold! Couldn’t have it getting back to Spain that I had failed her in the sack, I chuckled to myself.

  In the kitchen, I foraged around in the little Vinotemp that Justin had provided and found, to my amazement, a hard-to-find, small-production ‘08 Hilliard Bruce Pinot from the Santa Ynez Valley. I couldn’t believe the way everyone was treating me. Currying my favor with special bottles like this, and all the rest.

  I uncorked the bottle. When I turned away from the kitchen, Laura had slithered off the couch and was lying on a faux-animal-hide throw rug in front of the fire, which was now blazing away, tendrils of flame licking the flue. During the few minutes I had been gone she had somehow managed to remove her top, her jeans and her shoes and now lay contentedly on her side, in black bra and panties, her elbow propped on the rug and her head resting in her hand, staring contemplatively into the fire. With her olive complexion, the light emanating from the fire made her appear like some odalisque in a seraglio. The cigarette she had lit–she languidly blew smoke rings with her exhalations–could have been opium.

  I sat cross-legged next to her and handed her the glass of Pinot.