Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Thank you,” I said, coming out of myself, as if surfacing in a bathysphere, in an effort to settle the crowd. “Thank you.”

  They finally eased back into their seats. After a few minutes it grew quiet.

  I brought a fist to my mouth and cleared my throat. “I’m honored to be asked to emcee the great IPNC. Over the next couple of days I’m probably going to lose all hold on reality, so while I’m still possessed of a relatively clear mind, let me just say a few things. First, I want to apologize to the great vintners of the Willamette Valley who have been making, for the most part, trailblazing Pinots for years while my book’s and the movie’s focus was on Santa Barbara County. Whose Pinots are inferior.” I didn’t believe it, but I knew the partisan crowd would eat it up. No sooner had I said it than there came a burst of loud applause. I held up my hand like a snarky politician. “I’m sure I’m going to pay for that statement, but I’ve had the opportunity to sample a lot of your wines–I guess a few up here are hoping to buy some free publicity if I write a sequel”–a salvo of laughter–“but, no, seriously, I’m really impressed with how dedicated you all are to my favorite mistress: the ethereal, the elusive, the levitational, ne plus ultra of grape varieties: PINOT NOIR!” More deafening cheering, clapping–an unrestrained explosion. When it calmed, I finished in a rousing crescendo: “If Pinot went out of fashion, you’d still be making it.” Closing in a rising tone: “In Santa Ynez, they’re such a bunch of money-making whores, they’d probably go back to planting FUCKING MERLOT!”

  The attendees and winemakers were now stomping their feet and applauding and laughing until tears flooded their eyes. Many were jackknifed over in their chairs, clutching their guts–most quite prodigious! A few nut cases, already half in the bag, were so apoplectic with laughter they were rolling around on the lawn. It was a sight.

  In the midst of the pandemonium, I added into the microphone in the loudest voice I could muster: “Let’s all go get FUCKED UP ON PINOT!”

  I stepped away from the podium. Wine lovers swarmed me. Autographs, congratulations, questions. These were world-class Pinot-philes and Shameless had christened them, showered them with fairy dust. Their hard-to-vinify grape, usually grown in intemperate mesoclimates–beleaguered by late frosts and early rainstorms, not to mention foraging deer and dive-bombing birds and root-ravaging boar–was now the darling of the wine world. We had both suffered; and we had both triumphed.

  When I finally broke free I rejoined Jack, Joy and my mother. “So, we’re scheduled to go on this mystery bus tour. They don’t tell you where you’re going, but it’s some winery. I don’t know if they’re going to allow handicapped people on the bus.”

  “I want to go,” my mother pleaded. “Please. Don’t leave me all alone.”

  “All right, Mom, all right, stop your bellyaching.”

  Julie snaked through the crowd to shake my hand. “It wasn’t what I expected–all that colorful language!–but it was a huge hit.”

  “I’m glad. So, where’re the buses? And do they have handicapped access?”

  “Oh, absolutely. We have a number of special-needs attendees here,” she said, glancing down at my mother.

  “This is my mom, Phyllis.”

  “How do you do, Mrs. Raymond?”

  My mother lifted her glass. “I’m flying with the angels!”

  Julie chuckled.

  I turned to my mother, winked and said, “You might meet someone, Mom.”

  The old coot blushed from ear to ear.

  Julie led us to the modern, streamlined buses leased from one of the local Indian casinos, ordinarily used to ferry in the poor from even farther outlying areas so they could more quickly squander their welfare checks. The sun was now hoisting itself into the blazing blue sky. A zephyr of an onshore breeze was slithering over the Oregon Coast Range and cooling our perspiring faces.

  After everyone piled on our designated bus, a motorized ramp flipped open and hydraulically lowered. Joy rolled my mother on, the driver elevated and retracted it, and Joy wheeled my mother in. She had a primo seat right next to the driver, with a splendid view out the CinemaScopesized windshield. She was in heaven. Grasping one of the overhead straps to steady herself, Joy stood next to her, dutiful as ever, a wad of cash safely in her money belt, peace restored. A couple sitting in the front row politely rose and offered Joy their seat. Joy smiled and sat down and the couple, already a few sheets to the wind, careered into the back.

  The bus was full, so Jack took a seat next to Joy in the front. I wandered aft and found an aisle seat, by chance next to an attractive woman in her mid-to-late-thirties, with long straight auburn hair and an intelligent face. Instinctively, I goatishly checked for a wedding band. Negative. A crackle of electricity pulsed through me. God, I thought, I’m such a dog these days.

  The bus lurched forward. Within minutes we were touring the Willamette Valley countryside on winding rural roads. Out the windows we were witness to rolling fields of native grasses dotted with indolent livestock. And vineyards and vineyards and more vineyards, many of them sweeping up terraced slopes, as if climbing a vinous staircase to the skies.

  The woman next to me produced a silver flask from her handbag, unscrewed the cap and took a sip. Holy crap! My kind of gal! Curiosity got the better of me and I broke the ice by saying, “What is that?”

  She wordlessly handed me the flask. There was no question of my being a teetotaler–heresy at the IPNC!

  I took a sip. “Hmm,” I said, sneaking a second sip. “Limoncello?”

  Her eyes locked on mine. “You got it.”

  “Late night?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I was at the Archery Summit dinner. There was a lot of wine. Oh, my God!” She shook her head and affected an expression suggesting a wild night and a lot of drinking. “And you? What winery dinner did you go to?”

  “Didn’t,” I said. “Got in late.”

  She nodded.

  “Are you here by yourself?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m covering it for The New York Times.”

  “Oh, yeah? Wine journalist or…?”

  “Wine mostly, yeah. How about you?”

  “Did you… attend the opening ceremonies?”

  “No, I missed them. Barely made the bus.” She shook her head again, took another snortski of the Limoncello, and offered the gleaming silver flask back to me.

  “Well… I’m the master of ceremonies,” I said.

  Two prolonged seconds passed as she registered what I had said. Then her whole body swung sideways ninety degrees. “Are you Miles Raymond?”

  “Yes,” I said unrepentantly. “I am.”

  Her voice rose and the timbre changed. “You’re kidding? You wrote Shameless?”

  “Shhh,” I said, putting an index finger to my lips.

  She held out her hand and I took it. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miles.”

  Suddenly, she wasn’t so standoffish. “You realize you’re a hero to these people up here.”

  I shrugged. “Hero today, gone tomorrow.”

  She laughed. “I couldn’t help but notice you got on the bus with the older lady in the wheelchair. What’s the deal?”

  “She’s my mother.” I filled her in as succinctly as I could on the details of our journey.

  “Well, that’s sweet of you,” she said, a bit haltingly. “Didn’t your character steal from his mother in the book–and the movie?”

  “Okay, it’s… what’s your name?”

  “Natalie.”

  “Natalie. It’s fiction. I didn’t steal from my mother in real life. Okay, maybe a dollar now and then when I was a kid to get some candy, or maybe a little more when I was in high school so I could get some pot, sure. Not hundreds like in the book.” Sometimes reality and fiction got so intertwined in my wine-addled memory I couldn’t tell if I was coming or going. Lying or not lying.

  “I believe you.”

  “Could I have another shot of the Limoncello?”

 
“Sure.” She passed me the flask. I snapped my head back and took a quick, I hoped discreet, swig. The 100-proof vodka used to make the firewater was nicely sandpapering the serrated edges of my hangover. I had a beautiful woman next to me–a writer!–we were cruising through Oregon wine country on a beautiful, if blisteringly hot, day. What could go amiss?

  “You know where we’re going?” I asked.

  “No. It’s supposed to be a mystery.”

  “Oh, right. I like mysteries,” I said, my shoulder touching hers and receiving no resistance. She flashed a flirtatious smile, and nudged me back.

  Oh, no, I thought, here we go again.

  The bus’s hydraulic brakes screeched, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Everyone, as if schooled in the drill at previous IPNCs, climbed off–after, of course, my mother had been lowered on the lift.

  On the dirt shoulder, a large table had been set up. A breeze was gently billowing the tablecloth, anchored by aluminum buckets impaled with uncorked bottles of an assortment of refreshing whites from WillaKenzie Estate Winery. Two servers were pouring glasses for the parched and hungover IPNC attendees. Natalie, my new best friend, flanked me wherever I went. We both got a glass of the Pinot Gris, fruity and perfect for the torrid heat, an ideal palate opener for the reds surely lying in wait.

  I introduced Natalie to my Gilligan’s Island-hatted mother, who was already swilling a glass of Pinot Gris.

  Natalie said to her, “You must be really proud of your son.”

  Tears sprang to my mother’s eyes. She raised her tasting glass skyward and declared through welling tears: “He’s a genius.”

  “All right, Mom, let’s not get too extravagant with our encomiums, okay?”

  “Oh, get off your high horse with your big words!”

  Natalie hooted at my mother’s rejoinder.

  Jack and Joy joined us. She wasn’t drinking, but he was already on his second glass. I introduced Natalie to them, elaborating that Jack was the prototype for Jake.

  “Oh, so you’re the cad women see as the paradigm of noncommittal, immoral degeneracy?”

  Jack brandished his glass at me. “I’ll see you in court, dude.”

  Natalie and I touched shoulders and shared a laugh. The mood was festive, the air balmy… sexy… erotic… the wine hurtling me into that alternate universe where nothing mattered.

  After twenty minutes of sipping and confabulating, our group was accosted by a man in his early fifties, in heavy work boots, jeans and T-shirt, tromping out of the vineyard, his thudding footfalls kicking up dust. He stopped in front of the forty some-odd of us and said, “Hi, everyone, my name is Rick Marston. I’m the vineyard manager. Welcome to WillaKenzie Estate Winery.” There was a polite scattering of applause, and Marston swiveled a quarter-turn, gave a slow-motion pass with an arm as if he were a baseball pitcher and instructed us, “Follow me.”

  I turned to Joy and my mother. “Mom, maybe you should hang back here.”

  “No!” she fumed. “I want to go!”

  “Okay. Okay.” I turned to Jack. “We’re going to have to push her.”

  “No problem.”

  With Joy hanging back to smoke a joint, Natalie walked next to me as Jack and I each took one of the wheelchair’s handlebars and, following the trudging throng, pushed my mother up one of the loamy rows of the steeply sloping vineyard. Cresting the hill, sweating and hyperventilating, we took our place with our tipsy bus mates, who were scattered around in a loose assembly. Marston stood slightly above us and delivered a prolix and unnecessarily arcane speech about the Willamette Valley’s geology while the sun, gaining strength as it climbed toward its zenith, punished us. Mercifully concluding, he led us a short distance away to a dilapidated barn, a relic fashioned out of weathered planks.

  The vineyard manager stopped in front of its colossal double doors, as if deliberately trying our patience, turned and resumed his pro forma patter: “This is the cold storage facility of WillaKenzie. The grapes are picked at night and brought here to delay the spontaneous fermentation that happens when temperatures get above sixty-eight degrees. We allow them to sit for a couple of days–a process known as a cold soak–to achieve better extraction.” He turned and ceremoniously opened the doors to the barn, with a folksy, “Come on inside, everybody.”

  Inside proved to be a sultan’s oasis for wine lovers. The barn’s vast, high-ceilinged interior was ringed at the walls by blue-and-white checker-clothed tables. Behind the tables stood casually attired young people, tasting room staff, Natalie informed me, from other wineries, who had volunteered their services for the IPNC. More important, the tables were teeming with uncorked bottles, tasting room stemware, pitchers of water, baskets overflowing with crackers, and dump buckets. Light that speared through the cracks in the barn made the bottles coruscate with a gleaming allure. After the arduous hike and cripplingly boring, lengthy preamble, it was all worth it.

  The participants fanned out to sample some of the more serious wines of WillaKenzie. On display were also a number of Burgundies, which I was eager to sample. Natalie, who knew a lot more about wine than I did, and was particularly versed in Bourgogne rouges, helped me navigate my way through them, passing sometimes-trenchant judgments. “Too alcoholic,” she assessed a particular one. “They shouldn’t vinify Pinot at 14.9%. Ridiculous,” she castigated, spitting and dumping it as if it were Pinot plonk. Then she would discover one she liked. “Here, Miles, try this. Taste the balance. Gorgeous aromatics. Crushed rose petals. Plushy.” The deeper we delved the more enamored I grew. In my steadily more inebriated state, I wondered: Could this be my vinous soul mate?

  My mother cleaved to her coveted Chardonnays. Jack hovered over her and kept her company, noticing how I was making tracks with Natalie. Now and then our eyes would meet through the throng and he would widen his and then smile, toasting me with his glass. I toasted him back. At one point I broke away from Natalie, who had struck up a conversation with a Burgundian vintner–a pompous, potbellied, windbag wine enthusiast with a florid face and a nose ridged with burst capillaries–to weave a path through the crowd to where Jack and my mother were stationed.

  “How’s Natalie?” Jack asked.

  “Cool, man. New York chick. Beauty and brains–the ne plus ultra. Knows her shit, too. Fun to learn from. I thought Maya knew a lot about wine. This woman’s got it all over her.”

  “Sounds like a marriage made in heaven,” Jack said.

  “Or one ending in A.A.,” I quipped. I bent down to my mother’s level. “How’re you doing, you old coot?”

  She lifted her glass slightly. “Marvelous!”

  “Not what you expected when you were going through the vineyard, was it?”

  “No, this is the biggest surprise of my life! I feel like I’ve gone to heaven and died.”

  “I think it’s the other way around, Mom.”

  “Oh, yes,” she chuckled.

  “Hold your mug now.”

  “I’ll be a good girl.”

  I laughed and straightened up. Jack was checking out the crowd with a raptor’s keen eyesight. “See any prospects?” I asked.

  Jack scrunched up his mouth and gave his head a subtle, tight shake. “I don’t do gray, Homes.”

  I chuckled. The crowd was for the most part pretty elderly. To buoy his spirits, I said, “Natalie mentioned there were going to be a thousand people at the salmon bake tonight. And a fair number of single women your age. And younger. And drunk as skunks if it’s anything like last year’s bacchanal, according to her.”

  “Excellent,” Jack said. “It’s time to test the hammer out,” he said, patting his crotch.

  After the mystery tasting in the cold-storage barn, we were herded back to the bus. Everybody resumed the same seats, as if they had been assigned. After a short drive to WillaKenzie Estate Winery proper, we were treated to a lavish lunch, catered by one of the region’s fanatically locavore chefs. Seated at tables ringing the upstairs catwalk we were afforded a unique view of
the gravity-flow system WillaKenzie employed to transfer its wines from huge stainless steel fermentation tanks to French oak barrels.

  The food-and-wine setting was almost too fairy-tale for a Pinot lovercum-gourmand. My mother couldn’t stop raving about her belly of pork in puff pastry. I took great delight in my Beef Bourguignon spilled over a delicate, parsley-infused crepe. Dessert was a warm hazelnut cake. A flotilla of wine stewards kept us drowned in the grape. I tried to monitor my mother’s intake, but it was too hard, she was just having so much fun. Her good arm whipped like a flagellum for her food.

  Joy was waiting in the bus when our now loud and boisterous group returned and piled back on, some staggering and tripping over the steps. Joy grew a look of silent but simmering dismay at my mother’s condition: head slumped forward, badly slurred speech.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to her, tripping over my own words, “I’ll help you with the transfers.”

  In a fit of wordless pique, she stapled her arms across her chest, tensed her face, and gave no response.

  I returned to my seat next to Natalie’s. Half-drunk, my hand uninhibitedly found her thigh and squeezed it. A few seconds later, her hand found mine and our fingers intertwined, causing my heart to skip a beat. Next, like birds taking flight from on a pond without even so much as a warbling signal, their wings furiously aclatter in a synchronized rush, we were kissing like teenagers who didn’t care who was looking.

  chapter 13

  We returned to the campus. The casino bus disgorged a precociously inebriated group of IPNC participants. Most were professional drinkers and could hold their liquor, but one middle-aged woman hurtled out of the bus’s bathroom, the stench of vomit trailing her, looking like she had stumbled from the enormity of a battlefield where her faction had been horribly annihilated, her countenance that of a deathly sick cow.

  Off the idling bus, I pulled Jack aside. “Look, I’m going to hang out here with Natalie a few hours. She’s staying in one of the dorms. Take my mom and Joy back to the B&B, grab twenty winks and I’ll see you there in a couple hours.”