Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  The ensuing cheers and laughter turned into a collective ritual chanting, a drunken chorus: “DUNK HIM! DUNK HIM! DUNK HIM!”

  Julie extended her arm in my direction and melodramatically beckoned me to take the chair.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to put a black sackcloth over my head?” I shouted ruefully. Not waiting for an answer, I sat down and faced the cannibalistic throng. The chanting continued in a thunderous roar. An alacritous line formed behind a makeshift pitcher’s mound. Next to it was a mesh bag filled with softballs. There must have been a hundred or more. Behind the bull’s-eye was a net to catch the errant–I held out hope!–throws.

  Each pitcher was announced by a young man at a microphone by the mound. “And now, from Ayers Winery, Bill Upchurch.” A cheer went up from the crowd. Then the chanting. “Dunk him. Dunk him. Dunk him!” Upchurch threw wild and the crowd inundated him with mock execration. Each attempt was preceded by the same introduction. The line-up trying to take me down was predominantly male. I don’t know if it was the height of the bull’s-eye or the hurlers’ advanced inebriation, but for a good $2,000, en route to Portland’s most woeful, no one could get close. In my limited field of vision all I glimpsed was this silhouetted object tearing darkly through the spotlight. I braced myself each time for the gong, the spring of the trapdoor to open and the plunge of my limp, weightless body into the night. But it seemed, for a stretch, I was safe, as if I might escape ignominy at the hands of these high-end swilling, vengeance-maddened Willamette Valley drunkards. At one point I glanced down and saw Jack near the front, waving his iPhone to video each attempt at unseating me. I believed I heard him shout in frustration, “Fuck, man, give me the ball!”

  As the futile throwing of softballs dragged on, Julie brought a bottle of some Willamette Pinot and set it down next to me. I filled my glass, growing more confident I might be spared a dousing in the despicable Merlot. Julie returned to the microphone. “Come on, people. Surely, someone can hit the bull’s-eye,” she exhorted the crowd. As more and more people threw wide of the mark, more and more contestants lined up, credit cards in waving hands. With all the errant hurls, reminiscent of Tim Robbins’s wayward pitches in Bull Durham, it had suddenly turned into a competitive ego thing: who was going to be the one who could hit the mythical bull’s-eye? After every missed throw, Julie would shout out: “And that’s three-thousand six-hundred dollars for our homeless shelter.” It was starting to seem like one of those games at the county fair that’s deviously rigged so no one has a chance of winning.

  I must have grown complacent because just as I was insouciantly refilling my glass a thunderous CLANG rang in my ears. Simultaneously, I was suspended in mid-air, bottle in one hand, wineglass in the other, and soon in full ignominious free-fall. The chair and I separated just as we hit the vat of wine with a resounding splash. I hadn’t had time to prepare for the nosedive and collided with the wine in a fetal position, head forward. In the vat, a good deal deeper than I had imagined, I did a somersault and then, for a scary minute–or what seemed like a full minute–found myself in a state of aqueous vertigo, unsure which way was up or down.

  Finally, frantically, I broke the surface like a feeding trout, wineglass and bottle held aloft, sputtering arguably the world’s most insipid grape variety. The IPNC nut bags roared. They were absolutely psychotic with delight that someone had finally brought me down. Jack was dollying in on me for a close-up (he was directing again!), laughing his fool head off. Over his bearish head, I could make out my mother, at one of the front center tables, laughing uncontrollably, slapping her armrest like a single-flipper-ed seal. Natalie in the Mosh Pit was beside herself with glee. Where was Joy? I panned to where the line was. And there I found her, both arms raised ramrod upright in triumph. The organizers had given her, what appeared, a twenty-foot handicap, and she had nailed it on the first attempt. With my money!

  Why write? I thought, as I was helped out of the vat by two strapping young men, when I can just be a vinous Jerry Lewis character the rest of my pathetic life?

  Julie, over the microphone, through the roaring crowd: “Let’s give a rousing round of applause to Joy Soriano. Joy Soriano, everyone!” Cheers and whistling and applause erupted.

  The two burly IPNC aides hustled me back toward the ladder.

  “Hey, wait a second,” I said. “I’m not going back up there.”

  “Julie said to let you know there was enough time for another round. Plus, it’s for charity.”

  Wearily, bedraggled and drenched in red wine, but having suffered too much humiliation already to risk breach of contract now, I mounted the stairs like the bleating sacrificial lamb I had unwittingly become.

  Julie welcomed me back up with a broad smile and an outstretched arm. Into the microphone she hollered: “Miles Raymond, everyone! Give it up for Miles Raymond!”

  Another roar of approbation for my “charitable” work, my good sportsmanship, and my willingness to look like a fucking idiot, erupted from the crowd.

  “See,” Julie said as the crowd’s appreciation abated, “it wasn’t so bad.”

  I stared at her cross-eyed and shook my head in disgust. While one of the muscular aides reset the trapdoor and the other repositioned the chair and toweled me off for another go-round, I turned to the primitives, whose upraised glasses and bottles might just as well have been cudgels and spears, and shot both arms into the night with clenched fists, as if I had triumphed over some ordeal of initiation vouchsafing me passage into their dystopian universe. The aide who had re-secured the chair gesticulated for me to retake my throne of mortification. Seeing the natives in such a state of ecstasy–had some thrill-seeking Portland hippie, homeless no doubt, spiked their wine with a powerful hallucinogen?–I gladly resumed my position and waited for the next detachment of hurlers.

  Julie leaned once more into the microphone. “Our master of ceremonies has agreed to do one more sitting, ladies and gentlemen.” Wild cheers and a cacophony of shouted words greeted her announcement. “So, get out your wallets. The winning throw will receive a free wine-tasting dinner with none other than Miles Raymond.”

  Fuck, I never agreed to that either, I grumbled to myself, slumped in the foldup chair over the re-rigged trapdoor. This woman was really overstepping the bounds. Was Marcie getting back at me for canceling all those engagements at the last moment because a wine tasting dinner had gone too long and left me the worse for wear?

  The column re-formed, a Conga line of bloodthirsty neo-Dionysians, snaking rearward through the crowd. A contingent of Japanese–reputedly serious collectors of Bourgogne rouges and, it now occurred to me, serious baseball aficionados–their companions dressed in kimonos (in this heat?) moved to line up. The collective frenzy to bring me down a second time had been kindled and the crowd was pressing in closer much like a rock concert headlined by some hot new band.

  The not-so-hot local band started up, heaping on more discordance into the stifling night. Once again, the hurlers were individually announced before their throws. There was the usual number of wild tosses from the drunken revelers; some of the charitable donors even fell on their asses in trying to take me down. A couple got close. One even grazed the bull’s-eye, but didn’t hit it flush enough to spring the trapdoor, though I heard the mechanism beneath me threatening to let go. Gazing through the glaring spotlight, I noticed a hooligan contingent of the crowd was converging on the vat, eager for an up-close look at my definitive fall from grace. As if the ultimate humiliation hadn’t happened years ago!

  I pounded the wine as names continued being called out, softballs hurled into the night, the crowd booing robustly with every wayward attempt. At one point I gazed up at the stars, scintillating in the galactic amplitude of the Oregon night sky. I thought about the trip and how in a few days it would be over. About my sudden, totally unexpected, ascent to fame, and wondered how in hell it had brought me to this demented wine festival, to this chair, just a spring-loaded trapdoor between me and public
embarrassment. The women I had slept with and the lies I had whispered to them…

  And again my mediations were interrupted: BLANG. A moment passed, and I was in a free-fall once more. This time I landed feet first. I came up spitting Merlot, only to find that some of the Pinot enthusiasts were now stripping off their clothes and jumping into the vat with me. In horror, I tried frantically to climb out, but they wouldn’t let me. One psycho clamped two strong hands on my head and pushed me back down under the surface–and tried to hold me there! I shot up like a Polaris missile egesting wine from mouth and nose.

  “What’re you doing?” I raged in his face.

  The crazed sociopath screamed back at me and, obviously drunk out of his mind, attempted to dunk me again. I swung a hard right and caught him on the chin. He brought a hand to his face, looking shocked, as if: Not at the IPNC. Surely not. But before he could register what had happened the redhead and her crotch-scratching girlfriend from the signing had elbowed him away and were bearing down on me, wading through the chest-deep wine with the others, a small rookery of deranged pinnipeds. Both of them had stripped their tops off and were propping up their–to them!–glorious breasts with cupped hands. Thus, instead of sagging into the wine these four bosoms were held aloft as if offerings to the gods.

  “Come on, Miles,” the redhead slurred, her maw a disorganized whorl of fat lips. “Lick me, you satyr, lick me!”

  I turned away and once again tried to clamber out of the vat to freedom. The two evidently sex-starved women, and a few around them, got a hold of me and tried to pull me back in. Both hands clutching the rim of the vat in terror, I tried to hang on. I felt what I took, with a mixture of hope and dismay, to be a feminine hand slide into my pants. Rooting around for my cock, the hand managed to get a purchase on my scrotum and squeeze it like an exercise ball.

  At last I screamed bloody murder. “Help! HELP!”

  I surfaced after another terrifying dunking and found myself being mauled by the redhead’s camel-like lips. A moment later, a loud splash sounded behind me. I turned. In the tenebrous light, there was Jack dog-paddling through the wine, coming to my rescue. With his ample girth he pulled the women away from me, slung an arm under my armpits and hauled me to the edge of the vat, all the while shouting: “Get the fuck away from my friend, fucking wine whores!” He brandished an angry finger at two fanatical Japanese men, apparent victims of inherited dwarfism, both cackling psychotically like hyenas. “And you, too, you fucking nimrods!” Even in extremis, I was grateful that he’d refrained from one of his many colorful ethnic epithets.

  My trusty wing man hauled me over the edge and out. I crumpled onto the lawn in a heap, still coughing wine from my half-drowned lungs, and staggered to my feet, flailing my arms like windshield wipers stuck on high speed. The oenophiles who had leapt into the vat now disgorged from it like cockroaches from an NYC co-op cupboard opened at night. When Jack got hold of me and was dragging me away, the women and the guy who had tried to drown me had launched a half-hearted chase; now that I was safe, I took some pleasure in seeing them tangled up in their intoxicated and uncoordinated attempt to run, and toppling to the ground.

  I sought asylum at the table where my mother and Joy were parked, their eyes pinched shut with insuppressible hilarity. Everyone was laughing, but I was still terror-stricken. It was the highlight of the festival: Miles Raymond, celebrated author, performing two cannonballs into a swimming pool of Merlot; Jake and Martin now drenched in wine from head to toe. My mother and Joy were laughing so uncontrollably I worried they were going to defecate in their pants, and in unison.

  Natalie pried herself from the Mosh Pit and snaked through the crowd. “That was great, Miles!” she shouted.

  “Fuckers tried to drown me,” I said, still shaking.

  “Let’s get you over to my dorm and take a shower.”

  I turned to Jack. “I’m going to…”

  “I heard,” he said.

  “Did you see those fucking crazy chicks?” I asked him.

  Jack touched his forehead to mine and held me by the shoulders. We must have looked like two bighorn sheep head-butting over mating rights. “You are living high, Homes, you are living high.” He slipped a pill into my hand. “Now, go fuck that Natalie chick’s brains out. I’ll get these girls back. You were awesome, man. You were awesome! Video’s going to rock YouTube, dude!”

  He released me, and Natalie took me by the hand and led me away to another den of iniquity. I slipped the pill into my mouth and bit it in half. By its distinct bitter taste I knew exactly what it was. Natalie ushered me to the Mosh Pit, where she grabbed a magnum of some Pinot. A French vigneron admonished, “Hey, hey, hey!”

  “I’ll bring it back, François,” Natalie replied cavalierly, adding, “empty,” as she pulled me away. Once we were free from the main crush of the crowd we picked up our pace, and ran tangled-footed to the hay-bale fence, tipsy Natalie no doubt flashing back to a year earlier and her vilesmelling vigneron. Steadying each other, we clambered over the abrasive straw and fell on the other side, laughing. Natalie brought the magnum to her mouth, threw her head back and chugged it, her throat rippling in glorious peristalsis. She handed the bottle to me and I aped her style.

  “‘04 Arnoux Romanée St. Vivant! That was the vigneron, Pascal Lachaux,” she exclaimed. “He’s legendary. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Not as beautiful as you, Natalie,” I said, forearming spilled ‘04 Arnoux Romanée St. Vivant from my face.

  “I had to fuck him last year to get into the Mosh Pit to taste this,” she confided loudly, delirious with drink. She took another healthy swig and passed the monster bottle back to me.

  I exulted once again in the wine. Pinot at its most kaleidoscopic, exotic flavors ricocheting this way and that.

  “It was worth it, though,” Natalie said, her eyes wide and her face a little slack. She reached for my elbow and helped me up off the lawn. We half ran, half walked, tripping over uneven ground, back to the dormitory. Incoming freshman eager to lose our virginity, we giggled nervously as we stumbled up the stairs to her third-floor cubicle. We stripped off our clothes, knotted towels around our nakedness and crossed the hallway to a communal shower. Natalie killed the lights as I turned on the taps and got the temperature set to a luke-cool, the air was so hot. She slithered toward me in the crepuscular light. Her mouth found mine under the cascading water. With one hand full of dispenser soap, she found my cock and worked it into a stiff, skyward-yearning totem of concupiscence.

  We lathered each other until we were a pair of seals in heat cavorting on a slippery, moss-covered rock. A tall woman, but manageably slender, she was soon hoisted up off the ground and harpooned with my pharmacologically enhanced erection. We kissed and fucked perfervidly–she was on the pill, we’d never had any STDs, we were teenage virgins anyway, so fuck it–and went at it as if time were standing still. In a drunken vertigo, we whirled around the shower room, a lovemaking top spinning out of control. Until that top lost its energy and toppled to the tiles in a tangle of wet, soapy limbs.

  Back in her room we continued going at it, clawing at each other like feral animals unloosed in an amoral universe. She stopped me at one point, produced Pascal’s magnum of ‘04 Arnoux and beseeched me to reenact the scene in Shameless in which I, uh, Martin, poured Richebourg on Maya’s–uh, Renay’s–pussy and performed cunnilingus on her. Naturally, I obliged, even if this pantomime was becoming a banal and embarrassing routine with women who were fans of the book. Careful what you wish for…

  “Natalie Meunier,” I said, as I tipped the magnum and splashed her pussy with one of Burgundy’s finest. “Is that a nom de plume?” Without waiting for her reply, I buried my mouth in her wine-soaked nether region.

  “It’s my real name,” she moaned.

  “What a great name for a wine writer,” I said, licking her until her hands found my head and boxed my ears and silently voiced: Don’t you dare stop.

  I peeked a glance withou
t breaking my lingual stride. Her head was swinging back and forth, her neck muscles gone slack. She gazed unfocused at something in the fourth dimension.

  When I sensed she was teetering dangerously on the precipice, I rose and entered her again, plunging deep into her forbidden wetness. Her eyes took on the fey expression of a clairvoyant’s in presaging the end of humankind. I thrust wildly, having also glimpsed the Apocalypse.

  We came together, our bodies tensing, finally slackening, our conflagrant lovemaking at last subsiding on sheets soaked with perspiration.

  After a few minutes lying next to each other and catching our breath, Natalie rose from the twin bed and poured us more of the Arnoux. This woman, with her reedy figure, seemed to have no concept of satiety, at least when it came to wine or sex. But what wines! She was whisking me off to fabled Burgundy and, as a bonus, fucking me on the journey there! At last, I thought–risibly, I had to admit–my writing had paid dividends!

  “I almost blacked out,” she admitted.

  “You did?” I said, sipping the Arnoux.

  “I haven’t been fucked like that in months.”

  “You’re pretty hot, Natalie.”

  “You probably say that to all the women.”

  “True.” I kissed her lightly on the lips. “But I never mean it.” I kissed her again.

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Pfizer.”

  I sat up abruptly, my eyes bulged with chagrin.