Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Thank you so much for your hospitality,” I said humbly, adding in a mumble, “Beautiful hotel room.”

  “It’s our pleasure. You’re the guest of honor. In fact I bumped Stephen Tanzer from your accommodations.”

  It was little consolation, in my state of rising anxiety, to learn I’d usurped one of the great critics of the Burgundian world. Tanzer’s lectures at this festival had been sold out from early on.

  “Really? Wow. That wasn’t necessary, Jean. I would have been fine in a first-floor room with a view of the parking lot. He’ll probably trash my book now on his site.”

  She laughed. “We wanted to make it special for you.”

  “So, what’s the game plan here?” I asked, businesslike.

  “Well, I’m going to get up and give a short introduction to the festival, then I’m going to introduce you. You’ll come up and do your thing.”

  “Okay,” I said. I raked a hand through my hair, half out of nervousness, and half combing it into some vague notion of presentability. “Sounds like no big deal. How long should my speech be? I have nothing prepared.”

  “Just keep an eye on me. At some point I’ll give you this”–she raised a flattened hand and, smiling, made a gesture as if slitting her own throat–“and you can wrap it up, go back to your table and enjoy! Menu’s marvelous. And there’s plenty of wine!”

  “I noticed. Wow.”

  “We’re going to be going through hundreds of bottles tonight.”

  “Looks like it.” My panic had seemed to be ebbing, but no–it wasn’t high tide yet.

  “All Pinot. No Merlot,” she laughed.

  Marcie joined Jean in the standard guffaw, and I gave my now rehearsed smirk.

  “Let’s get seated,” my publicist suggested, “shall we?”

  “Again. Great to meet you, Miles,” Jean said. “And really curious to hear what you’ve got for us.”

  Me too! I wanted to say.

  Marcie, with her profession’s sixth sense that the client was a little wobbly, re-gripped my elbow and steered me to our assigned table–front and center. Winemakers and wine writers I didn’t recognize made up the rest of our group. They introduced themselves all around, smiles on their already ruddy faces.

  The white-coated sommeliers–most of them surprisingly young and some of the females equally fetching–threaded their way to tables, pouring wines into the four or five glasses set before each place now occupied by an attendee. Temptation was calling its siren song. I started sipping, just to get over the dry mouth that had set in. The speech I was to give was still uppermost in my mind and I wanted to keep my wits about me. Wine kept arriving. All Pinot Noir, of course, my favorite grape, in an absolute, ridiculous embarrassment of riches.

  At one point a winemaker I thought was from an outfit in Monterey showed up at the table with a magnum of one of his single-vineyard Pinots, inscribed to me in silver ink, and presented it as a gift. “Maybe you’ll put it in your next novel,” he suggested, winking almost lewdly.

  “Thank you,” I said, hefting the huge bottle with a glance at the label, which I didn’t recognize, and placed it on the floor next to me. Other winemakers made their way over to our table, also bearing bottles. By my position in the room they were all now apprised of who I was, nondescript physiognomy and deer-in-headlights look notwithstanding. The sips of Pinot that kept arriving were definitely improving my resolve, even my comfort level. Fawning attention, as any aspiring tyrant can tell you, is useful: it bolsters confidence. Hell, I remember thinking at one point, I can say whatever I want.

  As the appetizer plates started appearing, Jean took the podium, adjusted the mic, and spoke to the five hundred Pinot mavens. “Hi, everyone. Welcome to the World of Pinot Noir here at beautiful Shell Beach.” Applause greeted her opening line. The sommeliers kept appearing with more and more wine, pouring tasting dollops. Spit buckets filled up so quickly that they had to be replaced almost every half hour. “Tonight we have a special surprise guest.” She paused for effect.

  I turned to Marcie with alarm. “You didn’t tell me I was a surprise guest.”

  “That’s how they wanted it,” she said. “Just go with it.”

  I reached for one of the four glasses in front of me and drained it.

  Jean soldiered on. “As you all know, a man, an extraordinary writer”–I murmured under my breath that I wasn’t an extraordinary writer–“created a wonderful tale called Shameless. His book was made into a movie I’m sure all of you have seen.” More applause interrupted her introduction. “Most of us more than once. That book and movie glorified the grape we all love. Pinot Noir.” The applause was now interspersed with whistling. “Well, that author is here with us tonight. So, without further ado, I want to introduce… Miles Raymond!” Jean looked down at me and applauded, that reliable real-estate broker smile brightening her countenance.

  The five hundred Pinot-philes broke into wild applause. Many of them stood. I fortified myself with another blast of wine. Marcie grasped my elbow and helped me get to my feet. It was a short walk to the stage and the podium, and that was a good thing.

  As I approached the dais and made my way to the lectern where the microphone was, Jean stepped aside from the microphone, still clapping. The audience continued with her, urging me on. Despite my discomfort with my sudden ostensible fame, my determination was strengthening.

  I adjusted the mic to my level. I held up both hands as if I were saying, I’m guilty, I’m the guy. The guests resumed their seats, but the applause went on. “Please,” I said. I paused, looked around a bit sheepishly, then roared: “I’ve never seen so much goddamn wine in my life!” Hilarity greeted that opening. I had brought a glass to the lectern and took another invigorating quaff. “I don’t know what this is in my glass, but man this shit is da bomb!” I sipped a little more. “Before I wrote Shameless I was so poor all I could afford was five-dollar Merlot. And, man, that stuff was crap!” More laughter encouraged me. “When I wrote my book I never thought in a million years that it would have such an effect on the most noble of grape varieties. And kill that damn Merlot industry, which rightfully earned its ignominy.” More whistling and applause. I was on a roll. I held up my glass. “Would one of you kind sommeliers refresh me here with one of your finest Burgundies? I’m Pinot parched!”

  As the audience laughed and cheered, a young, beautiful female sommelier strode to the stage bearing a bottle with some arcane French label I couldn’t even read and generously poured me half full. I took a healthy sip, sudsed it around in my mouth and swallowed. “This is ambrosial,” I hollered to the crowd. “My God, I wish I could take all this wine and back-date it to seven years ago. Backdate the stock options like all those dot-com guys almost got away with doing.” That got another laugh. “When it rains it pours, I guess.” I took another quaff, and noticed Marcie looking a little anxious. But the wine and the crowd’s approbation were driving me on. I was theirs now. “I don’t know how you people can spit this wine out. It’s so good. Maybe that’s why my marriage failed.” I paused, sipped, shrugged, and added dryly, “She wouldn’t swallow.”

  The crowd roared. I may have been halfway to the crapper, but the one-liners were firing on all eight. I don’t know where it came from. All my usual neurotic inhibition had left me.

  I rambled on. “Never in a million years, in my penurious days, when I sat down to write Shameless did I think it would have such an effect on an industry. Never in my wildest dreams did I think someone would make a movie out of a book no publisher wanted to publish. I am so grateful that all of you, and the millions of others, have responded so favorably. Hell, I was just hoping to make a few grand, pay my rent, hire a hooker maybe, and be able to write another novel.” More hilarity. “I was so low when I wrote Shameless that if I could have afforded a gun I would have killed myself.” Gut-spilling, jackknifing laughter. “Seriously. Tall buildings had a mysterious pull on me. Freeway overpasses beckoned. Fistfuls of Xanax.” For some reason at th
at moment I took out the vial of Xanax I always carried with me and shook it. There was more laughter. “But it’s funny how success can soothe one’s anxiety.” They couldn’t stop laughing. “And wine! Great wine! The kind of wine we’re all imbibing tonight.” Many of the attendees raised their glasses in a mass salute. “Man, I’m in a two-room suite on the ocean–sorry, Mr. Tanzer–with some of the finest Pinots in my room, courtesy of you munificent and talented winemakers. I don’t deserve this. I was just a guy with a laptop and no girlfriend, a feckless fool with an aversion to a real job and nothing better to do than type to pass the time. And now”–I swept my hand with my glass, sloshing some onto my white shirt–“You all and a fine movie have made me a writer. I get to write now, and even tell people that’s what I do. It’s positively surreal.” I took another sip. “I could go on and on about the inspiration for the book, how I fell in love with Pinot–and a waitress who no longer chooses to be in my life–how I weathered my mother’s stroke, was down on my luck, how I was so broke when someone blew off my car door on Wilshire Boulevard as I opened it a little too quickly I didn’t have the money to get it fixed and how it became the Motel 6 du jour for the homeless, how I defenestrated out the back of my apartment when my landlord pounded on the front door. But, those days are past.”

  I sensed I was growing maudlin, so I stopped. “So. Some of you might have questions for me.”

  Arms shot up. At this point, in my recall, comes one of those blackout ellipses that only hardcore alcoholics fully understand. I remember at one point someone’s asking me about the notorious scene in the movie in which Martin, the protagonist, is so frustrated with his life that he drinks from a spit bucket at a high-end wine tasting. The questioner wanted to know if that had really happened. I think I explained that it was wildly exaggerated in the movie. And, yes, I remember that some besotted oenophile brought a spit bucket overflowing with Pinot to the stage. I was so intoxicated, with the Pinot and the adulation, that when he approached me all sense of reason went out the window. Time to deliver the coup de grace and reenact the scene as it happened in the movie. At first I pretended just to sip. I heard chants and exhortations from around the room. They grew louder, urging me to imbibe. Finally, in a move I can’t explain, I lifted the bucket high over my head and poured the entire contents over my uplifted, grateful face.

  The audience went wild!

  Marcie looked at me like she had wandered into a locker room after the Super Bowl and was thinking sports publicity was not for her. Jean was practically sawing through her own neck. I must have ignored them because I babbled on some more.

  I have little or no recall of the dinner. Or any of the wines consumed. I half-remember when the event concluded that the sommeliers gathered in a private room and drank until the wee hours of the morning, welcoming me into their cabal. They debated obscure wines and tried to outdo one another in their oenological knowledge. I must have tasted some sublime grape, but my palate was so shot it was wasted on me. Recalling my performance, several of them laughed until tears watered their eyes. Then, there were these two young, beautiful female sommeliers, one pressed to each side of me. That I vividly remember. Vaguely remember shambling back with them to my cliff-top room, groping them, stopping to kiss them, reaching an unrepentant hand into their clothing.

  Depending on whose perspective you were relying on, the kickoff event was either a rousing success or a total disaster. I had either made a total fool of myself or regaled the audience with one of the great opening speeches they had been lucky enough to hear. I can’t say, since it was all a blur.

  chapter 2

  Iwoke heavy-lidded, my head a molten ingot of lead as the room–what room?–kaleidoscopically rearranged itself into a solid. I sniffed the air. It was a malodorous mélange of perspiration, pussy, and plundered bottles of Pinot. As I blinked my surroundings into focus I vaguely recognized the brunette sommelier-in-training from the night before. What a pretty young girl like her was doing lying next to me I had trouble imagining. I was afraid if I closed my eyes I would be plunged into a dream in which I was homeless, a soiled rucksack slung over my shoulder, my extended thumb buffeted by rumbling 18-wheelers.

  I felt a stirring to my port side. What’s this!? A strawberry blonde had risen from the tangle of pillows and sheets. She looked like some model materializing mermaidlike from an infinity pool in a slick perfume commercial peddling happiness and youthful, hard-body romance.

  “Mornin’, Miles,” she cooed.

  She started to kiss me. Then she snaked hand down into my nether regions and attempted to restore me to life. I didn’t know if this 45-year-old wreck of a body could take it anymore. I had bitten off half of a Viagra to counteract the effects of over-imbibition, and it now had me turbo-charged as if someone had dropped a Rolls Royce engine into a VW chassis. While the blonde lightly snored and the brunette stroked me I came to the felicitous realization that these were the spoils of the life of a now celebrated author.

  But all the receptors in my brain just cried out for a glass of Pinot. It was tantalizingly just out of reach and I didn’t want to spoil the brunette’s concupiscent fantasy. “Enough concupiscence!” I almost shouted, my penchant for polysyllabics having had them in stitches the previous night. Where was my publicist? I suddenly wondered. As the blonde came awake, the brunette had, without warning, disappeared under the sheets to make my fantasy come true. I turned and kissed the blonde with the bed-tangled hair. Her lips were big and moist and, best of all, desiring, wanting, in unapologetic terms.

  I closed my eyes to the unbidden ravishing and let the both of them have their way with me. Two women in my bed–had I expressed this fantasy to them the previous besotted evening when I had charmed them back to the room with promises of autographed books and a glimpse into the personal life of one Miles Raymond, erstwhile failed Hollywood scribe turned successful novelist? Shameless was, for better or worse, a humiliatingly frank book that laid bare my soul. I thought it would be my ruination, my Hail Mary shot that would end up fluttering into the proverbial void, but instead it miraculously turned my life around. Unwittingly, I made wine appreciation cool. Everyone wanted in on the act. OK, I wasn’t handling it well. Who could blame me? Here I lay, two women devouring me, when a year before I couldn’t get a date to save my life. And still, in my jaded state of degeneracy, needing desperately to sandpaper the edges of a sledgehammer-pounding hangover, all I really wanted was a glass of Pinot. Pinot for pussy, I almost pleaded to the two wanton wine whores.

  The girls thrashed me finally to a perspiration-soaked, if awkwardly, limbs-entangled, conclusion. Pfizer made sure the crown jewels stayed in fine form for the final assault on the ramparts of young womanhood, but I almost fainted getting to the Promised Land. There was some requisite and obligatory hugging and nuzzling before they minced off to the shower, complete with hard-muscled naked asses the likes of which I hadn’t witnessed in a while, prone as I had once been to any body type in my desperation for any kind of female affection. I struggled off the bed and climbed into a plush terrycloth robe, knotted it at the waist, and poured a healthy glass of Pinot from the many uncorked bottles still littering the dresser. Feeling blissfully dissolute in the postcoital respite, I fired up a half-smoked Cohiba I found in an ashtray on the dresser. I didn’t smoke, especially cigars, but some ruddy-faced winemaker–who now loomed like a demonic elf in my fractured memory–had pressed it on me the night before, along with a bottle of his winery’s finest, and it seemed to complete the image of my shameless and unapologetic plummet into depravity. Success, mess, I muttered to myself.

  The picture window beckoned and I donned my new Revo sunglasses and stepped out onto the balcony into a blazingly bright morning, the sky as blue as my ex-wife’s eyes. The waves crashed against the cliff below, their explosions deafening. The ocean was an unobstructed amplitude of dark blue. Pleasure boats, disgorged from a nearby marina, listed against the strengthening wind and pimpled the sea. I felt sore–and at
the same time, sated–everywhere. It had been a long time coming. The previous decade could have been written off with the pathetic trope of a snail crawling on hot asphalt en route to Bakersfield. This fame shit is great, I thought, as I lifted the Riedel sommelier’s glass to my lips, coaxing in some of the delicious wine. But why am I feeling so wretched? so miserable?

  The girls re-emerged and flanked me. In the past, they would have disappeared after a shower (had they bothered with one), leaving no note, only the scent of their drunken abandon and the redolence of their ambivalence for having slept with someone they shouldn’t have–marital guilt? The ignominy of awakening to the realization of having just bedded down with a loser? This view was decidedly different, one I could get used to, if only my circumspect self wouldn’t keep shrieking in my ear that it was all ephemeral, an evanescent dream. Live it while you can, Miles, I intoned to myself. Live it while you can.

  “Wow, that was amazing,” I said, shaking my head.

  “You were amazing, Miles,” the brunette–whose name I was blanking on–said in a sultry voice. She was a tall, leggy woman, combing back a wet mane of hair, and I drank her in, raked her nakedness with lusting eyes.

  “I was?” I said, having little recall of the evening, remembering only being pitched and tossed about in a frenzy of sex and more sex.

  “How does it feel to be famous, Miles?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not famous. I just got lucky.”

  She pinched my cheek. “You can dispense with the false modesty, Miles. You are famous.”

  “I am? I don’t feel any different. But I realize that people perceive me differently, if that’s what you’re fishing for.”

  The blonde poured wine into a similar piece of Riedel stemware and handed it across to the brunette. The bulbous, pretentious glasses were a gift from the man himself for my having autographed a poster for the movie–Without Riedel I Wouldn’t Drink Wine! I had grandiloquently scrawled; he loved it. Did the ‘07 Bonaccorsi Pinot taste better in these glasses as some suggested? I couldn’t tell. All I knew was that it was a hell of a lot better than the $5 plonk that until recently had been all my budget could swing. It was big, voluptuous, fruit-forward, a true expression of the Pinot variety. The truth is, I didn’t know shit about wine. Experientially. I made it all up, relying heavily on Jancis Robinson’s brilliant encyclopedia on the subject, The Oxford Companion to Wine.