by Rex Pickett
“Fuck the publicity. I’m already a rock star in the wine world, you cretin!”
No doubt thinking of her commission, Marcie tacked. “I was told it’s all been checked out and approved by the proper regulators and it’s completely safe. Ten grand, Miles, plus another guaranteed five on the books.”
“Fuck. I’m calling PMK. You put the C back in woman, Marcie!” I hung up the phone and turned to Julie, who was shuffling nervously in place. I glanced up at the chair silhouetted against the night sky and sighed an emptying lungful of mounting anxiety. “That’s a hell of a long drop,” I muttered.
“It’s not fifty feet, Miles,” she said reprovingly.
“Fifty feet, fifteen. Some asshole hits the bulls-eye and I’m going into a vat of wine! You think Philip Roth would do this? Haruki Murakami? I’m an author! Not a circus act!”
“It’s for charity,” Julie pleaded.
“Looks like it was copied from the scaffold in A Tale of Two Cities,” I chortled nervously.
“It may have been,” Julie said with an arch glint in her eye, still ignoring, it appeared, my grave reservations about this ghoulish and mortifying exploitation of my ephemeral celebrity.
“My publicist failed to tell me about it,” I said ineffectually, and calming slightly, a few more quaffs of the Boedecker inuring me to the humility that awaited. “But, fuck it! I’m sure it’s safe, right?”
“Like I said we tested it this week and everyone had fun. No one got injured. Plus, it’s a warm night. You won’t have to wear the wetsuit.”
“Oh, great! What about the mask and snorkel? Let’s go full Hannibal Lecter, shall we?”
She laughed at my–ahem–gallows humor.
I dipped a finger in the vat of wine and tasted it. “What’s in the vat? A mélange of all of the Willamette’s great Pinots?”
She gave me a look of shock. “There’s over a thousand gallons in there, Miles. That would be tens of thousands of dollars of our stuff. No, it’s–don’t kill me–Charles Shaw.”
“Two Buck Upchuck!” I flung myself into her face. “You’re kidding, right?”
“It’ll be fun,” she said, reaching for my elbow and leading me away and back to the signing table, adding sardonically, “besides, the IPNC took out a million-dollar life insurance policy for you.”
“Oh, great. That’s comforting. No wife, no kids. I drown, half’ll go to my reprobate younger brother.” I drained my glass as if it were Gatorade and I had just crossed the finish line in dead last, and handed it to her. “Get me another glass, Julie. ASAP. I’m going to have to get really shitfaced for this one!”
“Whatever you need, Miles.”
“No promises on my behavior tonight! You’d better have paramedics on call!”
“Come on, you’ll be fine.”
At the signing table were some hundred wine aficionados, the line stretching all the way back to the blazing fences of oak, where lambent flames tongued the twilight sky. I eased into a padded foldup chair next to a young woman with a jaded emo countenance. A silver nose ring glittered from her prominent proboscis. A tattoo of a strawberry emblazoned her bare upper shoulder. Under the tattoo appeared the phrase: “Eat Me Wild.” In front of her was a credit card machine, ready for the literary looting of well-heeled wallets.
“Hi, I’m Chelsea,” she said in a high-pitched voice. “You must be Mr. Raymond.”
“Miles.” We shook. Her hand was lifeless and damp. “So, shall we get started?”
On cue, Chelsea stood, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “All right, everybody, we’re going to start the signing. Have your credit card or cash ready. It’s fifteen dollars a book.” She sat back down. “You’re going to make a mint tonight, Miles.”
“Yeah,” I grumbled, “if I live through it.”
She threw me a bemused look, then switched on her ingénue smile and started swiping credit cards and filling her little cash box with bills. The oenophiles descended on me once they had paid the tariff. Clutching their books, they all had a question or two for me–or more, if they were, and most were, bibulously inspired. Some wanted the book inscribed to someone special; others to people they disliked or considered philistines when it came to wine, and hoped my caustic personalizations would mirthlessly set on the path to higher-end appreciation. Business cards piled up on the table. Representatives for wineries as far away as France invited me to their châteaux. Wine dealers requested my presence at their shops, beseeched me to do a book signing or attend a tasting of rare Pinots. Women, still drunk from the day’s bus tours and numerous seminars focused on terroir and biodynamics, planted their hands on the table and leaned over me with their breasts hanging out, blatantly flirting. A few room keys were pressed into my hand. Fuck, at one point I had a hallucination of what it must have been like to be Tom Jones in his heyday at The Sands. Where were the panty tossers?
Julie dutifully plied me with artisanal Pinots–Raptor Ridge, Anne Amie, the unfamiliar winery names became a blur–no doubt still afraid I would bail on the “charity” part of the festivities and hoping inebriation would inure me to any ludicrous vitiation of my public image. Now and then I would step away from the table for a breather and try to uncramp my signing hand. As I gazed out over the commons, the event was really starting to fill up. Everyone was drinking. Voices ricocheted. As night fell the flames from the jagged oak-flaming fences rose higher and burned brighter, furiously licking the sky. Their incandescent light poured through the gigantic Chinook salmon, primitively harpooned into the lawn, turning their flesh a translucent orange. The whole tableau of the festivities looked like the gateway to hell–a hell where the wines were big and bold, the women swarthy and writhing in sinful and libidinous nakedness, the shirtless men goatish with erections–plunging its denizens into a Lethean realm of drugged oblivion. By night’s end I fully expected to witness lascivious scenes of alfresco fucking.
I sat back down at the autograph table and continued inscribing books. A pair of middle-aged women, dressed for the sultry night in bra-less tank tops, leaned into me. “Whom should I make this out to?” I asked, trying to make myself sound as if they were the first to get their books signed that night.
“I want to lick every inch of your body,” the redhead with the expensive breasts exploding out of a loose-fitting dress slurred, fastening her eyes on mine and not letting go.
Her brunette friend added, “And I want sloppy seconds,” before somersaulting into a tittering laugh that had the hair on my arms standing up.
“Let’s start with the inscriptions,” I said. “Then maybe we’ll see what transpires,” I harmlessly–I thought!–flirted.
The red-haired one said, “Okay. Write: I want to fuck you Deborah–Love, Miles.”
I did as she instructed, figuring she was entitled to anything her heart desired for her fifteen filthy-minded dollars.
Her friend said, “And I want to fuck you, too, Carol.”
“I don’t know if I have a sufficient supply of Viagra,” I attempted to joke.
Deborah the Red whipped her tank top down and proudly showed me her prodigious breasts for a good few seconds, then closed up shop. Her friend splayed the fingers on one hand and raked her crotch while giving me a tongue wave. They sashayed off with their books into the teeming crowd, hula-hula-ing their prodigious bottoms while throwing me backward come-hither looks.
“Do you know them?” Chelsea asked.
“No. And that’s why I don’t believe in past lives.”
She smiled a look of befuddlement, and resumed collecting the Pinot enthusiasts’ money.
They kept pouring in, crowding in on me like whales beaching themselves involuntarily on the shore of my celebrity. Some arrived bearing bottles and glasses, demanding that I taste their artisanal Pinots. I was beginning to feel a little like Tod Hackett, Nathanael West’s fictional set painter, at the premiere that spins out of control in Day of the Locusts.
More books, more Pinot enthusiasts. Then N
atalie ethereally appeared out of apparent nowhere to semi-rescue me. She had in tow a modern-day Hemingway-esque Count Mippipopolous who was cradling a jeroboam of something French, no doubt Bourgogne rouge, any other grape variety constituting a desecration of the IPNC. “This is Miles Raymond,” Natalie introduced me. “Miles, this is Harvey. Huge collector of Pinots. He’s from the mosh pit.”
“The mosh pit?”
“There’s a group in the center–high-end collectors–and they’ve brought some really rare bottles and they’re letting those who know someone taste them. Like me, for instance. It’s called the Mosh Pit.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “You met the right woman, Miles.” She turned to the corpulent man with the jeroboam, no doubt–judging by his excess avoirdupois–nursing a nasty case of gout. “Pour Miles a glass, Harvey.” Natalie plunked a sommeliers’ glass on the signing table. Cradling the jeroboam with both hands, Harvey, a little unsteady at the helm, emptied a healthy dollop into the Riedel. “‘96 Gevrey-Chambertin grand cru. Clos de Bèze,” he said, with full flawless, pretentious, French inflection.
“Ah,” I remarked, pretending to have heard insider rustlings of the indubitably great wine. I gave it a swirl, put my nose into the cavernous opening of the Riedel and inhaled deeply. My olfactory senses were invigorated by the intense perfumed quintessence of a great hand-crafted Pinot. In the mouth, it caressed my palate like a candied ectoplasm that clung preternaturally until the last bit disappeared. “Nice,” I said to Harvey. “What does one of those jeroboams go for?”
He spluttered into a loud guffaw, the laugh of a truly rich, truly obese man, a train without brakes, a steer being electrocuted to death. “At auction?” He furrowed his brow. “Ten thousand. If you can find it.”
I took another three-hundred-dollar–by my inebriated math–sip. It was pretty magical. A beautiful balance of fruit and acidity, not one of those made-for-Parker 15.8% alcohol fruit bombs–often blasphemously bulked up with Syrah–which really traduces the variety. “I feel like I’ve been christened,” I said, which elicited another earth-trembling guffaw. “Natalie, could you get me a plate of food, some of that oak-fired salmon, Indian style.” I lowered my voice, “And later I’ll do you Côte d’Or style.”
A laugh shot out of her pretty, fellatio-friendly mouth. “Sure, Miles. Whatever you want.”
She and the count threaded their way through the crowd, the festival-goers crowded closer and closer as the venue overflowed its peak occupancy. The Japanese lanterns strung overhead glowed brighter… and blurrier. The temperature was still humidly in the nineties, a sweltering heat wave, Natalie had informed me, that supposedly visits the Willamette Valley only once a year. Several young men, no doubt vintners from afar, having already crossed the vinous Rubicon, had stripped their shirts off and were now swilling Pinot bare-chested and pounding their chests like savages over a fresh kill and the discovery of fire.
A river of autograph seekers kept streaming toward the table, as though the line extended out of the Oak Garden and overflowed into the streets of McMinnville. I didn’t know how many books I could sign before my hand would start looking like my mother’s. The Clos de Bèze was still hitting me as if I had awakened in another world surrounded by sinuous nymphs.
Natalie reappeared with a heaping plate: the oak-roasted flesh of salmon, pasta primavera, farmers market mixed greens, and a truck farm of vegetables. She scissored open a foldup chair, plopped down next to me and splayed her legs. I continued signing while I picked at the food. Delicious, particularly the salmon, which I forked ravenously into my mouth to help my stomach keep pace with the unstoppable flow of wine.
Natalie asked with a wink, “Are the women behaving?”
“Are you kidding?” I slid over the pile of business cards and hotel room keys. “They’re indefatigable. Unrepentant. Hornier than jackals in the spring.”
“You’re hot, Miles.”
“Fuck, Natalie, I’m over forty, on the road to fifty.”
“Last year I met this vigneron from the Côtes de Nuits. His teeth were stained brown from cigarettes and wine. His pores reeked of Pinot. He was one of those Frenchmen who only shower every other day. But when I tasted his wines, I fell in love.” She pointed to the chest-high wall of hay bales demarcating the perimeter of the Oak Garden. “He fucked me on the other side of those bales last year. One of the best fucks of my life,” she said, her eyes ablaze with the reflection of the fires, burning into mine with the intimation of an imminent reprise of that night.
“That’s good to know, Natalie,” I said, picturing her, as men are wont to do, naked and spread-eagled under some malodorous Frenchman ramming her with his pathetic little gherkin.
She rose loose-limbed from the chair. “I’ll let you get back to your book signing. I’ll be over at the Mosh Pit.”
“And in a few moments I’ll be up there.” I pointed to the platform with the lonely chair high above the vinegarlike miasma of wine, meant to cushion my fall.
“You’re kidding me?” she said.
I shook my head and threw my arms in the air in mock exasperation. “It’s for charity. Plus, these people are so hammered I doubt any of them will be able to hit that bull’s-eye. And if one lucks out, I could use a little swim in this heat.”
Natalie kissed me on the mouth so fiercely I thought it might be a deliberate move to ward off all the other women. She turned and disappeared into the raucous crowd, which appeared, as the heat hung on unabated, to grow more and more native.
I kept signing. Chelsea kept slashing open more boxes and hauling out more books. More business cards, insistent, drunken offers to fly to this exotic place and stay at that incredible château or villa. It would all be a blur in the morning, the business cards and the hotel room keys the detritus of yet another wine-soaked bacchanal, discarded into the wastebasket in my suite. If that was where I woke!
Julie finally came to rescue me. “All right, it’s time,” she said. “Come on.”
I gazed at the gallows in the distance. “I don’t know about this, Julie.”
She clutched my elbow and pulled me away. “It’ll be fun. These people’ll remember this one forever.”
Glass in hand I followed her zigzag–as if I didn’t know where she was leading me!–through the crowd. I stopped briefly at our table, where my mother, Jack and Joy were eating and drinking. My mother had made a friend in a jolly old man and they were trading anecdotes about life in the military.
“How’re you doing, Mom?” I asked, placing an arm on her back.
“Marvelous,” she said, holding up her glass.
“Are you getting enough wine?” I asked rhetorically, because half-empty bottles littered the table.
“Oh, yes,” she said. She turned to the man who was sitting to her right. “This is my son, Miles.”
The man half-stood, as if he still had shrapnel in his lower back, thrust out his hand and said, “The young fellow who wrote Shameless! It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miles. Such a wonderful mother.”
“Yeah, she can be at times.”
“Oh, you be quiet,” my mother said.
“Miles,” Jack boomed. I turned. “When’s the wine dunking?”
“How’d you know?”
“It’s the talk of the festivities.”
I glanced up at the platform over the vat of plonk. “Fuck, man.”
“I’m going to put you down, dude.”
“You can’t afford the entry fee, Jackson.”
He leaned back in his chair, so far I thought he was going to topple over, and laughed uproariously.
Joy looked like she might have been drinking a little, too, letting her hair down. Instead of that perennial scowl, her face had a healthy blush.
“How’re you doing, Joy?”
“Fine,” she chirped in the most animated voice I had heard since picking her up at Las Villas de Muerte. She had been drinking.
“Good. Glad everyone’s happy. Duty calls.”
I broke away from my anomalous, ad hoc family and continued my dead man’s walk toward Julie, awaiting me at the foot of the stairway to the wine gallows.
“Are you ready?”
“No,” I said, and power-chugged a grossly overfilled glass of the Clos de Bèze, a teenaged heathen hunkered down in a sewer main with a pint of Ripple, knowing the police are on their way.
“Let’s go,” she said, ignoring my renewed remonstrations. She began the ascent up the nearly vertical wooden ladder, employing her hands. I haltingly followed. We popped up out onto the platform and, fifteen feet above the lawn, I faced the unruly Pinot-soaked multitude, those who wanted nothing more than to see the guy who had championed Santa Ynez’s overrated Pinots get his due–all in fun, of course.
Cued by some unseen sadist, a bright spotlight burst like a supernova over the heads of the crowd and illuminated the two of us. I squinted against the blinding glare and tented my eyes in what must have looked like a salute. The band ceased its mind-numbing Classic Rock so Julie could be heard over the PA system. I gazed in revulsion at my drunken persecutors. Julie took the microphone and attempted to get the revelers’ attention. “Hello, everyone,” she shouted. “I hope you’re all having a good time.”
Cheers erupted. Wine bottles were hoisted aloft. More men had dispensed with their shirts. So had a few women. Some of the males were now down to boxer shorts, even briefs, a smattering of women down to bras and panties. These semi-nudists danced unsteadily in place, a tribe initiating a sacred sacrifice in which a heart would be plucked from a still live, writhing goat and devoured while still twitching. The fires from the salmon bake silhouetted the celebrants in a fiery backdrop. I felt like I was at the throwing end of the Islamic Stoning of the Devil.
Julie, in a rising tone, soldiered on. “For a mere hundred dollars you get one throw at the bull’s-eye…”–she gestured with her arm to indicate where the target was. The huge disk swung adjacent to the platform, parallel to my head–“to bring down this year’s emcee… Miles Raymond!” Cheers and catcalls greeted her announcement. On that cue, another spotlight was switched on, illuminating the disk that, if struck, was going to trigger the Rube Goldberg contraption and send me plunging into the cesspool of plonk. “All the money goes to support the Daniel Jordan Shelter for the Homeless, here in Portland. A worthy cause. So, get out your credit cards and open up your pocketbooks. Here’s your chance to send the famous author, Miles Raymond, the man who made Santa Ynez”–boos, catcalls, howls, yelps erupted from the assembled troglodytes–“synonymous with Pinot into a vat of his favorite grape: MERLOT!”
