Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  Snapper, sniffing something that made him–and hetero men everywhere in the world!–go crazy, ran up to her and started leaping up and trying to get a closer whiff of her forbidden, and now redolently ripe, fruit.

  “Snapper. Stop that,” my mother scolded.

  Snapper darted back to my mother, lifted his leg and urinated on her wheelchair, then leapt up into her lap with the agility of a bullfrog.

  “Mom, this is Laura. I met her in the tasting room.”

  “Did you drink from the wine bucket?” my mother screeched.

  “No, Mom. I didn’t drink from the spit bucket. I spilled a little wine when I saw you flying down the hill. I still can’t believe you did that.” I burst out laughing at the recollection of my mother hurtling down the knoll in her wheelchair in her death-defying pursuit of her dog. “Jesus–fucking–Christ. If you want to commit suicide, let’s go to a gun shop and put you down properly!”

  Laura and Joy exchanged raised eyebrows, unaware that my mother and I were comfortable with this sort of macabre badinage.

  “Watch your language,” my mother reproached. “He’s watching.” She pointed to the hot blue sky.

  I looked up where she was looking and said histrionically, “Sorry, God.” Then I looked back down at her. “All right, let’s get you back.” I clutched the handlebars on the wheelchair and spun her around. It took the strength of all three of us to push her back up the hill. Now and then it felt like a Sisyphean effort and, yes, admittedly, a part of me secretly wished she had gone in peace, wineglass in hand, soaring heavenward with her imaginary angels. But the woman had the proverbial nine lives of a cat. She had survived two marriages, three rambunctious sons, a pulmonary embolism, a massive cerebral infarct, and arrhythmic heart attack, and congestive heart failure. She was one tough old bird.

  Gasping for breath, we finally reached the crest of the hill. I let a still-shaken Joy take the reins. Laura and I hung back. When they were out of view Laura wrapped both arms around me and hugged me tightly. Sometimes interrupted sex can make a woman cleave to your body in anticipation of deferred gratification.

  “Will you come to Paso Robles?” I asked in an undertone. “I didn’t mean to be so forward. You just really turn me on.”

  She looked up at me with ardent eyes. “We said we would.”

  Relief suffused me. “Great. Because I really want to get to know you better.” I kissed her to demonstrate that I meant what I said. And I did. “Plus, we have some… unfinished business.”

  Laura laughed, and we kissed again. “Okay, Miles, we come to Paso.”

  chapter 7

  We decamped from the carnage at Foxen, leaving Susan an outrageously generous tip, and headed north in the direction of Paso Robles, meandering along the serpentine two-lane Foxen Canyon Road. The prevailing afternoon winds had sprung up and the local raptors were out tracing black, foreboding circles in the sky. More vineyards in full bloom fled past us like film through a sprocketless projector that would not turn off. In the rearview mirror I could make out the royal blue Toyota FJ Cruiser, Laura and Carmen aboard, right on our tail. It hadn’t been much of a decision for them. We were all high on wine and once I convinced them that they’d have no trouble making their midnight flight out of LAX the next day, they were up for more adventure.

  In a low voice so my mother and Joy couldn’t hear, I told Jack about going down on Laura in the vineyard and her nearly coming just at the moment my mother careered down the hill. Jack laughed so hard tears reddened his eyes.

  “How was she?” he asked.

  “Fucking hot.” I lowered my voice even more. “She’s got hair all down the inside of her thighs. Positively animalian.” I raised my voice again. “Plus, she knows a lot about film and literature. Super-bright chick.”

  “There you go,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, but she lives in Spain.”

  “You like Spain. Maybe after this trip you should move there, shack up with her, and write that next book you’re all brain-crippled about.”

  “I told her I wanted to come. But I didn’t tell her about my flying issues. How am I going to get there? That’s a fourteen-hour sustained panic attack.”

  “I’ll fly with you, dude.”

  “How about you and Carmen? Is there a spark there?”

  “I think the chick wants me,” Jack said, a self-satisfied grin archly planted on his face. He patted his stomach. “Despite the belly.”

  “She wants Jake.”

  “Jake. Jack. Who gives a shit? What’s your line: ‘sometimes reality is more fiction than fiction’?”

  “Yeah.” I motored down my window. The air was warm, and fragrant with the odors of the indigenous flora. I shot a backward glance and found my mother with her head cocked to one side, fast asleep, lightly snoring, the wine having served as anesthesia. Joy sat dutifully next to her, her eyes trained out the window, enraptured by the passing countryside. Snapper lay in the shape of a comma on the rubber-matted floor, napping by his food bowl.

  “Why don’t we pull over?” Jack suggested. “Laura can ride with you and I’ll ride with Carmen.”

  “Better if my mother doesn’t know they’re coming with us to Paso.”

  “Dude, she already knows. She may only be firing on three cylinders, but half an engine still puts her in the upper twentieth percentile.”

  “I don’t want you pulling over and hitting tasting rooms and doing Carmen on some country road and then losing the trail.”

  “I know where we’re going,” Jack, pussy on the brain, argued. “And I’m not going to do her in the car. What do you think this is? A frat party?”

  “It’s only a few hours to Paso. Let’s just mellow out until we get there.”

  Jack produced two plastic cups, defiantly poured them half-full out of the bottle he had cadged from Foxen and handed one to me. It tasted divine. And I desperately needed divinity after my mother’s headlong plunge toward oblivion. I could just see the headline: “Author’s Mother Perishes in Freak Wheelchair Vineyard Accident–Wine Involved.”

  “Don’t let my mom see it,” I whispered to Jack.

  “No problem, short horn.”

  Jack glanced out the rear window. “Chicks are right on our tail.”

  “Did you think they were going to ditch us?”

  “It’s happened.”

  We wended our way back to the 101 past an apparent infinitude of lush green vineyards and rollercoastering rangeland. There was something so pacific in these untrammeled vistas that an unaccustomed serenity fell over me.

  We finally reached the freeway. I exhorted a grumpy Jack to cork the Foxen and stow the sippy cups under the seat. We peeled off on the north onramp and sped in the direction of Paso Robles, Laura and Carmen right behind us, as if their Toyota were on an umbilical cord connected to our Rampvan. God, I thought, a little Pinot in the mid-afternoon, a woman who is a vision of pulchritude and desires me, blue skies, nowhere to be, no clock to punch, no baleful employer, my best friend in the world next to me cracking me up and laughing again as if he–we!–had no cares in the world… why wasn’t I happy?

  “This celebrity thing is weird,” I muttered to Jack, growing philosophical.

  He turned and looked at me. “How so?”

  “Well, I was nowhere, nearly homeless, as you know, and suddenly one book, one movie, and I’m hoisted to some ethereal plane where everything seems sort of Barmecidal.”

  “What the fuck? Jesus, Miles, you should have to go one week and only use words with less than three syllables.”

  “Fewer. But don’t tell me you don’t know the meaning of Barmecidal?”

  “Bar, definitely. Homicidal. I’m getting there!”

  I laughed. “Anyway, means the illusion of abundance. Barmecide was a nobleman in The Arabian Nights who served an imaginary feast to a beggar.”

  “Why?”

  “To mess with his head. Same reason rich people do most of the shit they do.”

  “Asshole!”
Jack snarled.

  “Anyway, I’m just worried I’m at that illusory feast and soon I’m going to be that indigent beggar. I’m already dreaming about it. My unconscious is fatalistically conditioning me for The Fall!”

  “Just go with it, Miles. Try to enjoy the moment and not get all tangled up in your fucking intellectual psychoanalyses.”

  “I’m trying to. But I’m wondering if I’m getting away from my true self. I mean it’s sort of an out-of-the-body experience to go into these tasting rooms that the movie, instigated by me, made famous, and see all these amateur wine enthusiasts with my book, crammed together swilling like they’re on the eve of the Apocalypse. Then doing all kinds of crazy shit like that guy back at Foxen.” I shook my head to myself. “Then you meet some pretty girl and a half-an-hour later you’re licking her pussy in a vineyard. It’s like something you would make up to impress your friends at a party or something and no one would believe you.”

  “Well, believe it,” Jack said. “Because it’s all happening right now.”

  “But we both know it’s fleeting. Look at you. Seven years ago you were a hot TV director, and now look…” I cut myself off, not wanting Jack, who was feeling momentarily liberated from the onuses of his life, to sink into a miasmic depression.

  “I’m a loser now, is that what you’re saying?” Jack countered in a voice tinged with hurt.

  “No. You’re the same Jack, but your circumstances have obviously dramatically changed. And mine will, too. This won’t last forever. You know that.”

  “Well, you can choose to enjoy it while it does last, or just let all this fun pass you by and then five years from now regret that you didn’t partake.”

  “Yeah, but my overriding question is: am I losing the person who created all this celebrity in the first place? You know my famous adage: what you’re doing is what you’re becoming…”

  “… And what you’ve done is what you’ve become. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boo-hoo.”

  “Yeah, but tell me, am I becoming just some wine whore? Propped up to promote a product? You think it’s enviable–and I suppose in some ways it is: the women, the hard-to-find artisanal wines suddenly there when you want them–but I’m afraid the ground is foundering under me. And I’m afraid that I’m medicating myself with wine to numb myself to all these concerns. I mean, I should be back in Santa Monica writing right now.”

  “Miles. Look in the rearview mirror.” He adjusted it for me. “What do you see?”

  I could make out LAU-ra and Carmen laughing and bouncing up and down to music we couldn’t hear. “Happy girls.”

  “Hap-py girls! Ex-actly! Fun, Miles.” He closed his hand into a fist and rubbed it against my unshaven cheek. “Have you forgotten our little conversation the other night?”

  “The live-for-the-moment lecture?”

  “That’s right, dude. Live for the moment. Because all your brilliant Jungian insight isn’t going to mean shit when that blood clot rockets to your brain.”

  I nodded, unconvinced.

  Jack tacked. “And this trip isn’t without purpose. You’re doing a very humanitarian thing. You’re taking your poor mom to live with her sister.”

  “My poor mom who didn’t even want to have kids,” I reminded him.

  “Whatever. She needs you now. And you’re coming through, man. I wouldn’t want to be in that place where she was living. That’s no life. You’re fucking saving her from a fate worse than death.”

  “I guess,” I said, the wine starting to wear off and a low-grade depression burrowing into me like a pernicious corn weevil. “But all the women. I mean, I could be sleeping with a different woman every night.”

  “Why don’t you?” Jack said.

  “Because that’s not what I’m looking for. It takes a lot of effort. Plus, I’m worried I’ll get jaded. I sometimes wonder if I’m only going to be able to get off if I start doing some really kinky shit to them like that famous actor whose name we won’t mention who could only get off by peeing on them in showers and then masturbating on their faces.”

  “Who was that?” Jack asked.

  “Sorry, Jackson. I can’t really divulge the name because it would compromise the woman who was the recipient of his kinky fantasy.”

  “I don’t really want to know anyway.” He looked at me and mused, “How the hell did we get to golden showers?”

  We rode in silence for a while. I glanced back several times at my mother and Joy. My mother was still snoring in her chair. Snapper, in tune with my mother’s wine-induced slumber, slept at her feet. When she had been released from the hospital after her stroke and returned to her condo, her dog had kept her company in the desolate stretches when she was all alone. In the process she had so anthropomorphized the little monster she was practically married to him.

  “How’re you doing, Joy?” I asked in a voice low enough not to wake my mother, who would immediately clamor for a pit stop.

  Joy turned and looked at me. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you having fun?”

  She pointed out the window with one of her diminutive fingers and said, nodding, “Beautiful scenery.”

  “Central California. Yeah, it’s very beautiful. Still somewhat undiscovered. I bet you could find work up here easily. You’re really good at what you do. And I appreciate your patience with my mom.” I pointed a finger at her in mock reproof: “But you’ve got to be a bit more vigilant with that little devil there.” I shifted my gesticulation to Snapper, whose ears suddenly straightened and his eyes popped open–as if he heard and understood me!

  “I will,” she said. “I promise.”

  In the tiny town of Templeton, just south of Paso Robles, following our trusty GPS, we took the Las Tablas Road turnoff, rode a few miles, then hung a right on Vineyard Drive, a winding stretch of ten miles that coursed tortuously through beautiful, opulent vineyards and towering trees, until we came to Justin Winery, a beautiful tract of wine property. A lot of money had been poured into the place by the owners, who I was informed were out of town. Their palatial estate stood sentinel on the highest knoll. All it was lacking was a moat and guards patrolling with automatic weapons and they could have weathered a natural disaster, swilling the finest wines and guffawing at the chaos the world had been plunged into. My kind of life!

  Jack and I tumbled out of the Rampvan. Joy roused my mother, who spluttered awake, and then wheeled her out after Jack and I had dutifully extended the ramp from the van’s undercarriage. Behind us, Laura and Carmen braked to a halt, climbed out of their rental and stretched their hands, fingers splayed, to the sky. Their armpits were shaded with hair. I glimpsed wild boar stampeding in their dark eyes.

  Laura came up to me. “It’s so beautiful here, Miles.”

  “Not as beautiful as you… LAU-ra.” I raked a hand through her lustrous dark hair. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”

  She smiled. It was beautiful. All you could hear was the sonorousness of birdsong emanating from the wooded surroundings. The atmosphere was a hothouse of redolent plant smells and the hum of an ungoverned insectary. It was a sweltering afternoon, but I could already begin to feel the cooling air rushing in from San Simeon, streaming off the chilly Pacific. I felt refreshed, rejuvenated, invigorated. God, it felt good to be out of LA.

  “Mom, this is Laura–whom you met–and her friend Carmen. They’ve come up to see me speak tonight,” I properly introduced the lovely Spanish pair.

  My mother, still groggy from the wine at Foxen, shook their hands and fortunately didn’t say, in her unrepressed way, anything that would alienate them. Since her stroke, she had a disconcerting habit of expressing exactly what was on her mind, uncensored, unbowdlerized. After shaking their hands she looked all around her and drank in the beauty of Justin’s property. She pointed that gnarled finger of hers at the sky, as she was wont to, and rhapsodized, “Oh, this is to die for, Miles. Why can’t I move here?”

  “Because you’re going to live with your sister in Wisconsin.”


  “Oh, that’s right,” she said obliviously, as if she truly had just awakened to the point of the trip.

  “Besides, you’d be drunk on wine all day. Because that’s all they have here, Mom, is wine and more wine.”

  “Oh, don’t make fun of me. You drink, too.”

  “I drink. You drink. We all drink for ice cream.” Everyone laughed, giddy with the exhilaration of having landed in a new place.

  “Oh, stop it,” my mother said. “You’re being silly now.”

  I looked up and noticed that Joy had drifted off and was facing toward some topiary shrubs. She took a few blasts off a joint, snuffed it out in her little Altoids tin, then returned to where we were milling around, smoke curling wispily out her nostrils, a smile tucked on her face, the mood adjustment having been effected.

  “Feeling better, Joy?”

  She smiled and nodded enthusiastically.

  A few minutes later, a middle-aged man with graying hair and a sparse beard that seemed to only flourish around his chin came out to greet us. An amiable-seeming mixed-breed dog trailed him. Snapper, now on a leash, barked like crazy, growing defensive at the sight of the much bigger animal.

  The man affably introduced himself as the director of sales and marketing and said his name was Mike. He pumped my hand. “I’m so honored to meet you, Miles.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mike.”

  I introduced our motley crew, including Laura and Carmen. As Snapper and Mike’s dog continued to yelp and sniff each other’s privates I pulled Mike aside and said, “I know you only have four rooms in your bed & breakfast and I realize my publicist only booked two. But there’s been a little change in the configuration of our party between Bien Nacido and here. Is there any chance that one of the others is unoccupied?” I leaned close to him and said in an undertone: “When my friend has sex he’s so loud I can’t concentrate.”

  Mike chuckled as he glanced at Laura and Carmen. “As a matter of fact, we kept all four for you so you would have complete privacy.”