I woke 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, perfume and plundered bottles of Pinot. As I blinked my surroundings into focus I suddenly realized I was in a hotel room somewhere. That was for certain. Where, though? There was a warm body next to me cloaked in the covers, lightly snoring. Which one? I wondered. The blonde? The brunette? One of the sommeliers, that I knew. 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 her stirring. I pulled down the covers to get a better look. What’s this? A bald head? “Jesus Christ!” I cried out loud, jerking backward and trying to get away.
The owner of the bald head turned and opened her eyes. She (!) had dark eyebrows and dark eyelashes and was actually quite pretty despite the . . . baldness!
“What the fuck?”
“Good morning, my love.”
“Jesus Christ. Where the hell is your hair?”
She furrowed her brow and ran her elegant fingers across her fleshy pate. “You told me to take it off.”
“Take what off?”
“My wig! Remember? We had a deep conversation about my alopecia.”
I shut my eyes and opened them again, hoping it would change the landscape. No such luck. She was now staring at me intently. My head was throbbing. This was not good. I’d experienced blackouts before, I’d awakened in many unfamiliar beds, but this was new territory.
“I told you to take it off? What?”
She grew visibly agitated. “You said you loved me better in my natural state.”
“Loved?”
“Yeah. Like some white African princess deep in the jungles of that novel . . . ?”
The end of the night’s bacchanal was starting to come back to me like a disquieting dream that had slithered away in the throes of over-imbibition. “Ayesha. H. Rider Haggard?”
She brightened. “Yeah, that’s him, sweetie.” She wriggled toward me and kissed me on the mouth. Our breaths were both appallingly halitotic. “I can put it back on if it makes you more comfortable,” she cooed. She kissed me again, this time more aggressively. “You can wear it like you did last night. Come on, H. Rider, show me that dance you did.”
I suddenly flashed on an image of my wearing her wig and dancing drunkenly on the balcony as some of the Pinot revelers, who had come back to my suite, egged me on. I drew a hand across my face. When I looked up she had somehow managed to straddle me and was now hoping to pry an erection out of me where none was to be had.
“What’re you doing?”
She reached over to the nightstand, grabbed her wig, hastily plopped it on her head, then said, “Is that better? Remember me now?”
I glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. It read: 11:11. “Shit. My publicist is going to be here any minute.”
“Oh, come on, Miles. Make love to me again.”
I pushed her off. “You’ve got to go . . . ?”
“Ayesha,” she replied sharply, dismounting. She clambered off the bed, gathered up from the floor the dress she was wearing the night before, a slinky purse, and disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later I heard the shower come to life.
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 one of the many uncorked bottles still littering the dresser from the previous night’s party. Feeling blissfully dissolute, I fired up a half-smoked Cohiba I found in an ashtray. I didn’t smoke, especially cigars, but some ruddy-faced winemaker—who now loomed like some 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. In the distance, 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 from the previous night’s sex. She might have been bald, but she was a stunning-looking woman and a tigress in bed, if memory served. 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?
Ayesha reemerged. She was stunningly beautiful, now that she had magically put herself together, wig and cleavage-revealing cocktail dress. Tall, statuesque, muscular arms. In the past, a woman like this would have disappeared after a shower (if she had bothered with one), leaving no note, only the scent of her drunken abandon and the redolence of her ambivalence for having slept with somebody she shouldn’t have—marital guilt?; the ignominy of awakening to the realization of having just bedded down 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.
“I’m sorry, what’s your name?” I said.
“Magali,” she replied with what sounded like a foreign accent.
“Magali. I’m sorry I freaked out on you this morning. I just . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s happened before.”
“You’re really extraordinarily beautiful,” I conceded.
“Thank you.” She ruffled my hair. “You were amazing last night.”
“I was?” I said, having little recall of the evening, remembering only being pitched and tossed about in a frenzy of copulation.
“How does it feel to be famous, Miles?”
I shrugged. “I’m not famous, Magali. I just got lucky. Tomorrow I’ll be teaching creative writing at a community college in Fly Over Country.”
She giggled and 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.”
Magali poured some wine into a similar piece of Riedel stemware and took a sip, as degenerate as I and everyone else at a three-day wine festival was wont to be. Our 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 very much about wine. Experientially. I made it all up, relying heavily on Jancis Robinson’s brilliant encyclopedia on the subject, The Oxford Companion to Wine.
“You look a little down, Miles,” Magali said.
I turned and gazed into her brunette-featured face and smiled wryly. How could she read me so well, I wondered? I guess the twin emotions of elation and depression were warring inside me and my tired and spent expression bore both equally.
I forced a smile and held up my glass. “No, I’m happy,” I said. “A gorgeous woman, a hit movie, the honeymoon suite with the ocean view. All the Pinot I can drink. What more could a guy like me ask for?”
“Do you have a girlfriend back in LA?” she probed.
“No.”
“How come?”
“I’m picky about wines, and I guess that spills over—no pun intended—into my feelings for women. When my life was shit I would have married a parking enforcement officer I was so desperately lonely. Now, I feel like everyone wants something from me, including women. I’m having trouble differentiating fact from fiction.” I held up my glass in a toast to the Pacific, to the world, and all that awaited me therein, and concluded, “Maybe I just got so used to the fact that I would never have anything to do with someone as fucked as me—I had given up.”
“Maybe you just want to serially date for a while,” Magali reasoned.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It doesn’t appeal to me.” I held up my glass and stared into it, ruminating. “I’m really looking for love.”
She raised her bold, black eyebrows circumspectly, a sly smirk on her face. Wasn’t the Miles Raymond she had imagined. Probably because she had thought she was meeting Martin West, Shameless’s protagonist-narrator, not me.
“Seriously,” I said. Then I cheered up. “But since you’re engaged”—now it was all coming back to me!—“you’re out of the running, Magali. Plus, I’m not sure it’d be good for my liver to fall in with a master sommelier.”
She laughed. “Yes, I’m engaged, but he’s on the other coast, so . . .”
“The hundred-mile rule, right?”
“Right. Anything goes.” She hooked an arm around my neck and kissed my ruddy cheek. “You were funny at dinner last night, Miles,” she whispered into my ear.
“Was I? My recall’s a little fuzzy.”
“You wouldn’t think from reading your book that you would be the type who could do speaking engagements,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I just, I don’t know, drank myself through it, I guess.”
“When you lifted that spit bucket and poured it over your face and shouted out ‘No more fucking Merlot!’ that crowd went berserk.”
“What?” I said, suddenly alarmed.
“Don’t you remember?”
At the memory, Magali broke into irrepressible, eye-watering laughter. My chin sagged to my chest in mortification. As after a lot of drunken blackout nights, my own recall could be snapped quickly into focus by someone’s painting a vivid picture of an incident that alcohol had mercifully occluded. Now, it all came back to me in a stinging, humiliating rush. Holy Christ! I remembered now how the crowd had grown positively primitive and tribal about it, pounding the tables with their fists and imploring: DRINK! DRINK!
I turned to Magali. “Did I really do that?” I asked, feigning ignorance.
“Oh, yes,” she said.
“I don’t believe it.”
She turned and went back inside the room and a few seconds later returned with a white dress shirt, extended the sleeves and modeled it. The entire front was Rorschach-ed with red wine, a rag-like testament to my public opprobrium and refutation of my selective memory.
I glanced at it with increasing embarrassment. I brought the wineglass to my mouth, deciding I needed a little more memory obliteration. “I’ll never live this one down,” I said. “Fuck, that’s going to be on YouTube tomorrow,” I muttered.
“It’s already up,” she said. “But the quality’s poor. Cellcam, I think.”
“Oh, what a consolation!” I said, genuinely aggrieved. I tried to sort through the potential repercussions of this now viral dissemination of disgrace, but it was too much to deal with, so I just took another healthy sip of the sublime Bonaccorsi to chase it away.
“It’s the World of Pinot Noir, Miles. We all let our hair down. Don’t be depressed.”
I nodded, suddenly feeling a little weary. The wine festivals, the book signings; they were starting to take a toll on me.
“I should go,” Magali said. “If your publicist’s coming.” She winked.
I turned and kissed her on the mouth. “I wish you were available.”
“I wish I were, too. Bye, Miles. See you around.”
“See you, Magali.”
We kissed again and then she left. When I heard the door close I went back inside into the wreckage of my suite. I lay contentedly on the bed, sommelier’s glass resting on my expanding waistline—I made a mental note to get back into the gym, even though it didn’t seem to matter one whit to these wine worshippers—and reflected on how everything had changed so dramatically in my life in just the last six months. Emceeing wine festivals, hosting faculty dinners, women looking at me with a whole new aspect and degree of attraction. Okay, admittedly I had been sipping wine since waking—and I would have to work on that as well, I mused ruefully—but I wasn’t sweating rent, wasn’t scheming stealing from my poor mother, was no longer in a state of paresis over how I was going to get through the next damn month without succumbing to the St. Vitus’s Dance. All the years of suffering—living on the edge, the divorce from Victoria that capsized me into despair, my mother’s debilitating stroke, my career in tatters—all of that had been magically wiped clean with one book, and a glorious movie. Sure, the press had first cluster-fucked the director and the stars, but finally they realized this wasn’t the Immaculate Conception and that indeed there was a novel behind the whole Èclat. And suddenly, I was the go-to guy for Pinot Noir. It was a riot. It was all just too incredible. And a lot to deal with all at once.
I was basking in it, though. I had nowhere to be. I could afford to let my phone ring off the hook, even when I knew it was someone important calling, many of them clamoring for a piece of my soul. The more I blew them off the more they wanted me. What a novelty! The women found me sexy. Yeah, sexy! The salacious things they drunkenly whispered in my ear. Married, affianced, committed relationships. They didn’t give a shit. The married ones were the most uninhibited. Christ, don’t you men fuck your wives anymore?! I almost shouted out loud as I mused on this phenomenon. God, these women. I didn’t understand them. What was it about some middle-aged guy who had written a moderately successful book? Had my looks suddenly, supernaturally, transmogrified into those of a movie idol? Did sleeping with me and receiving my bodily fluids constitute some irreligious category of christening into the numinous realm of creativity where, it seemed, everyone dreamed of residing, but which few could actually attain? Was I a genius and didn’t even know it? Hell, film people, agents, others, were using the “G” word with regularity now. Best not to get too big a head I spoke out loud to myself—a tic I had developed from spending too much time alone—as I continued sipping my wine and reflecting on my newfound good fortune.
My new iPhone jangled on the nightstand. I glanced at it. It was Jack. Did I want to hear his boozy voice? In the seven years since we made that serendipitous and novel-inspiring trip up to the Santa Ynez Valley, he had fallen on hard times. Shortly after his opulent wedding his wanton philandering had picked up where it had left off. Assistants on the TV shows he directed, location groupies, scuzzy barflies, any willing woman he could get his meaty paws on and seduce with his outsized charm—it was as if he was on a self-destructive tear to destroy his marriage. Because once you cheat on your spouse and get away with it a couple times there’s no more moral superego. The libido runs riot. The fresh pussy feels intoxicating, transformative. You can’t get enough of it.
Then, invariably, the wife gets wise. She kicks you out of the house, lawyers up after couples therapy dismally fails. Throw in a kid—a cute little boy named Byron—and the inexorable, nasty, venomous divorce from Babs, the custody battle protracted and expensive—and your life becomes a living hell, the stress nerve-shattering, drink-inducing. And Jack was drinking more now than ever. His benders were being bruited about by an already too-gossipy industry. Like a lot of people who drink too much, he didn’t care about the fallout; they’re so immured in their misery that they lose all touch with reality and soon it’s too late and they find themselves unemployed, sans wife, visitation rights stripped away from them by an unsympathetic judge, bank-gutting child support payments, alimony, and all the other detritus of a wrecked life. That’s where Jack had landed with a thud and being around him had ceased to be fun. His usual bonhomie had turned lugubrious and sullen. Still, I felt an obligation, what with all my success, to be his ameliorant, if that’s what he needed. Hell, his lovable roué of a character had made me thousands. I owed him. And he was not shy about reminding me that our financial situations had flip-flopped.
“Jack,” I said. “What’s happening?”
“Where are you, Miles?”
“Up here in . . .”—I glanced at a brochure on the nightstand; I didn’t even know the name of the hotel I was staying in!—“Shell Beach. Shell Beach Lodge. The World of Pinot Noir. Two women just left.”
“Bullshit,” he roared.
“I’m not pulling your leg, Jackson. It’s fucking nuts up here.”
“I told you you were going to get laid off of this.”
“Man, they were off the charts, dude. These women in the wine world. You’d think they’d be dehydrated from all the alcohol and come with purses overflowing with Astroglide, but, no, they’re lubricious. And you’d think they’d pass out, but, no, their tolerance levels are Falstaffian, they want to fuck all night! It’s wild, dude, it’s wild!” It was a stunning reversal of fortune, our discrete lives, and I enjoyed needling him about it.
Jack listened without saying anything. I thought I could hear him dragging on a cigarette, disgruntlement or envy rasping his silence. “That’s great, man,” he finally allowed. “When’re you going to take me on one of these extravaganzas of yours? Let me be your factotum,” he bellowed, somewhat pathetically. “I need the money. And you need the protection.”
I chortled. “From what?”
“All the women, short horn.”
“You just want me to deflect the rejects into your coop.”
“That too,” he said. There was a pause. Jack dragged on a cigarette and I sipped my wine.
“Look, Jack, I got your message a couple days ago. I know you asked me for five grand and I haven’t forgotten.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to bring that up,” he said proudly.
“No, it’s okay, it’s cool. I’ve been there. I know how hard it is to ask for handouts.”
“I mean, I was the inspiration for the Jake character in Shameless after all.”
“That you were. And I’m tired of your using that as a fulcrum to lighten my wallet.”
He grew silent. “You owe me, short horn. You had a good run with Maya, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, my euphoria dipping a tad. I reflected for a moment on the relationship, now petered out, with the Hitching Post waitress—the commute, a new love interest in her life that derailed me for a while, and then my descent into unbridled hedonism a few months ago when the movie hit.
“Whatever happened with that?” Jack prodded. “We never really talked about it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The movie. The attention. I don’t know. I don’t think she was happy with that hot tub scene where I licked a ’90 Richebourg off Renay’s—meaning her—pussy.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t make the movie. And it made her the hottest fucking waitress in the Santa Ynez Valley.”
“True. True,” I conceded. “But, you know, I’m not sure I’m ready to settle down, big guy. There are weak moments when I think I am, then another side tells me I’ve still got some wild oats to sow here. Relationships are a tough gig. Tell me? How can I possibly be faithful at this magical juncture in my life? And at least I have the smarts to recognize that, and if I find myself inclined to get into a committed relationship, the likelihood that I’m going to hurt some wonderful woman like Victoria is too omnipresent. And I don’t like hurting people. It’s very taxing.”
“I hear you, brother, I hear you.” I heard a gurgle of liquid. Jack was warming up, the glow was slowly returning to his morose mood. I had an image of him sliding slowly into a hot tub, the ills of his life melting away with every inch of immersion. I didn’t dare bring up Byron, Babs, the directing gigs that weren’t there as they had been, the one-bedroom walk-up in Silver Lake where he was now unhappily ensconced with futon and TV and six-packs of cheap suds and little else.
“Look, I’ll loan you the five. No, fuck it. In fact, I’ll give you ten.”
“What?” he said.
“I just sold the German rights for twenty. Wasn’t expecting it. Euros dropping out of the sky. But, I want something in exchange.”
“I’m listening,” he said, tugging on the cigarette.
“Okay, I told you that I’ve been invited to be the master of ceremonies at the International Pinot Noir Celebration in McMinnville, Oregon, right?”
“I think you mentioned it, but you didn’t want to go or something.”
“Well, I wasn’t. These festivals are killing me. I want to get back to my writing. But I’ve decided to accept this one.”
“What?! You weren’t going to tell me?”
“Jack! I was planning to take the Coast Starlight all the way up to Portland. I was going to make a relaxing week out of it. Read a good book. Tap out some ideas that have been rattling around in my brainpan.”
“Jesus, man, we talked one night about going up there together. Where’s the loyalty, Miles?”
“I confess I was just a little too afraid it was going to be another bacchanal with the two of us.”
“Bullshit. You met a chick who wanted to go. Miles Raymond. Celebrity author. I get it, dude, I get it.”
“Well, okay. But the chick and I had a falling out.”
“Uh-huh,” Jack said, incredulous.
“No, seriously. She told me she was looking to get married, I told her I wasn’t, so I didn’t want to string her along. Especially because she wasn’t really right for me.”
“What was the problem this time?”
“She waxes.”
“Ah.”
“You know I like some fur down there.”
“I know, brother, I know.”
“So, anyway, I was going to cancel, but then a flare went off in my head. Why not drive? Schedule a couple book signings along the way, take in the scenery, get out of the hurly-burly of LA . . .”
“Road trip!” Jack interrupted excitedly. “I am all in, brother. I am all in.”
“But there’s more to the plan.”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
I sipped my wine. “So, my mother’s very unhappy in Las Villas de Muerte”—our moniker for her assisted-living facility—“down there in Carlsbad.”
“Yeah, that visit last month was sad, man. Sad. God, I hope we don’t end up like that.”
“Okay, well, I have to hear about it every day. I did the best I could after her congestive heart failure almost killed her, but even I have to admit that’s no life for anyone. Anyway, she wants to move back to Wisconsin to live with her sister. Her sister needs the money, and my mother could use a little more of the home-cooking touch, if you know what I mean.” I took a sip of wine to fortify myself. “Plus, the whole thing is draining me cash-flow wise. Not that I mind, but . . . So, I was thinking, I don’t like to fly, my mother can’t fly in her condition, if we rented one of those handicapped vans, drove to the Willamette, gave my mother one last big send-off, then drove her to Wisconsin and dropped her off at her sister’s . . . Anyway, that’s the plan.”
“Dude.” I could see Jack’s eyes bugging out. “Your mom’s a . . .”
“Hold on,” I chopped him off. “I know it sounds wack, but bear with me. My mom’s got a favorite nurse—a little Filipina named Joy. I’ve sort of floated the possibility of her accompanying my mother on such a trip. And she’s totally willing. Especially for the cash I was offering.”
Jack slurped whatever alcoholic beverage he was drinking. “I’m still listening.”
“Five days to the Willamette Valley. Three for the festival. Two-day blitzkrieg to Wisconsin, drop my mom off at her sister’s with Joy who’ll oversee the transition, I get hammered, pop some Vicodin, and you get me on that flight back to LA. We have a great time, I give my mother this gift of being with her sister and liberating her from that depressing assisted-living facility. Plus, I get her out of my hair, get her expenses down to a more manageable number before she bankrupts me—the woman will not go down. What do you say? I know it sounds like I’m a little twisted right now—and I’m getting there—but I think it could be fun.”
“I don’t know, man. Your mom’s in pretty bad shape, dude.”
“I know, but I know how to handle her. Hand her a glass of wine and she’s putty. Remember, I was the one who had to take care of her and get her into Las Villas after my little brother ripped her off. Plus, she’s going to have 24/7 with the highly trained Filipina caretaker. But I can’t do all the driving. I cannot do this without you!” No response. “Jack? You want to be my co-pilot? Make some coin? That’s my offer.”
“I’m trying to wrap my head around this,” he said. “Why don’t you just FedEx her or something? Ground rate. Should be cheaper.”
I laughed at the image. “Ten grand. Hard cold. Post-tax. The finest restaurants. Five-star hotels. And, of course, all expenses paid. We’ll have a blast.”
“You’re fucking nuts,” he laughed.
“Not exactly breaking news. No, honestly, Jack, this is for my mom. She’s really miserable in that place. And I’ve got the means now to make her potentially happy. It’ll be good for my soul.”
Jack was easing into the possibility, lubricating the path with cheap wine, or rotgut vodka. I knew ultimately the money would sway him. “The Filipina can totally handle your mom?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen her transfer Mom from her wheelchair into a car. Chick’s strong, man. She does this for a living for Christ’s sake!”
“Ten grand?” Jack asked, as if to be sure.
“Yeah! Jesus! How many times do I have to say it? Forget the salvation of my soul for a second. It’s going to save me money in the long run because it’s going to be cheaper for my mom to be with her sister. I just got to fucking get her there.”
There was a pause. I don’t know if it was the booze speaking or if he just wanted to escape his abject life, but he spoke with unbridled exuberance, “All right, dude, let’s do it. Let’s get Phyllis to Wisconsin.”
There was a familiar loud rap at the door. “Hey, Jackson, there’s someone knocking. I think it’s my publicist. Can I call you back?”
“Your publicist,” he said sarcastically. “You crack me up, Homes. All right, call me back.” He hung up.
Whoever it was knocked again, this time more sharply. “Who is it?” I called out.
“Marcie! Are you decent?”
Before I could respond, she barged in. It struck me for some reason that she was most likely lesbian, but the thought of some pretty young thing going down on her made my jittery stomach retch.
She pulled up a chair next to the bed and slouched her corpulence into it.
“Jesus, Marcie,” I said, quickly pulling my complimentary robe over my exposed groin. I muted the volume on the TV. The sound of the crashing waves filtered in through billowy curtains covering the sliding-glass door. Marcie was wearing some sort of sweater-like poncho over a blouse and a skirt that mercifully ended below the knees. But even then one still got an eyeful of the vast network of varicose veins that road-mapped her calves. “What’s up?”
She sniffed the air like a narcotics dog and said, “What’s that smell?”
“Sex. And a lot of it,” I retorted, just to needle her.
“Oh.” She glanced circumspectly at the monstrous glass of wine in my hand and said, “Aren’t you starting a little early?”
“I’m on vacation,” I said, holding up my glass in a toast to her sneering presence.
She shook her head wordlessly. Out of a satchel she produced a MacBook and pried it open. “Do you want to see yourself last night on YouTube?”
Depression surged in and ruined my mood. “No, Marcie, I don’t.”
She shook her head again in overt disapprobation. “I can’t decide if it’s good or bad publicity.”
“I heard it was pretty damn funny.”
“You were funny, Miles. But, did you have to outdo yourself with the spit bucket? I sincerely hope that’s a one-off.”
“You heard that crowd, Marcie. They were going to riot if I didn’t reenact that stupid scene for them! You said just be yourself, so I was. Fucking wish I hadn’t written it.”
“Well, I’m going to write it off as being caught up in the moment,” she said, closing her laptop, adding admonishingly, “and hope it doesn’t happen again.”
“So, what have you got for me?”
“I’ve got a wine festival in Santa Clarita . . .”
“Screw that,” I chopped her off. “Santa Clarita Wine Festival. That sounds like an oxymoron. What do they want me to do? Sit in a booth all day and sign books. Screw that, Marcie. It’s a bastion of John Birchers out there.” It was exhilarating to be in the position to turn offers down.
“It’s five thousand.”
“I don’t need five grand that bad. Forget it. What else?”
“This high-end cruise line wants you to be their enrichment lecturer.”
“What high-end cruise line?”
“Silverseas Cruises. Ever heard of it?”
“No.”
She passed me a brochure. I leafed through it. Looked pretty high-end. “Only 300 passengers. One-to-one crew-to-passenger ratio. Thirty wines free, which might intrigue you.” I kept paging through it. It looked mostly like rich retirees sailing off into the sunset.
I raised my voice to a histrionic level: “Silverseas Cruise! Free morphine drip! Burial at sea! 24-hour Medevac to nearest ER! The last cruise you’ll ever take for more reasons than one!”
She laughed, pausing to inject a little sense of humor in her usually splenetic temperament. “This one might do you a world of good, Miles.” She adjusted her reading glasses and read from her handwritten notes: “Let’s see, it starts out of San Pedro and goes all the way down the coast of Mexico, stopping for golf along the way—Cabo, Mazatlán, Acapulco, Costa Rica—then it passes through the Panama Canal, sails all the way to Ft. Lauderdale where they’ll fly you business class back to LA.”
“Business class!” I shouted, divalike. “Fuck that! I’m Miles Raymond. Author of Shameless.”
She pointed a finger at the glass of wine resting on my stomach. “You’ve got to slow down, Miles. I’m sure I can negotiate it up to first if that’s a deal-breaker for you. Fourteen days. All you have to do is screen the movie, tell a few choice anecdotes, conduct a wine tasting . . .”
“Drink from the spit bucket.”
“No, not drink from the spit bucket, but hobnob friendily with some very wealthy people.”
“Friendily,” I scoffed. “That’s not a word, Marcie. The correct word is friend-li-ly.”
“Whatever.”
“Where’d you go to college?”
“Vassar.”
“Vassar? That’s a great school, or so I heard.” I paused and took a sip of wine. “Do you know a good lawyer?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because I think you have an ironclad case to sue for a refund on your tuition. Then you could afford the cruise. Or at least the weekend in Santa Clarita you’re hankering for.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“Marcie, facetiousness aside, you know I have trouble boarding jetliners. Remember I told you I once had to be deplaned in Rapid City, South Dakota, off that 50-seater Canadian Air. That panic attack cost me $2,500 because I had to drive home. Forget it. I told you, anything involving flying is not in the cards for me.”
“Miles,” she said in an exasperated tone, “you’re going to have to get over your aerophobia if you want to take advantage of these opportunities I’m bringing you. This is a lot of money you’re turning down. This is your fifteen minutes of fame.”
“What do you want me to do? I’ve tried Biofeedback. Total waste of money. Mountebanks! I spent a grand on a series of DVDs from some airline captain and that didn’t do shit. I’ve tried meditation, medication, even mediation. I just get claustrophobic on a plane. Have you ever had a panic attack where you thought a giant octopus was planted on your chest and wouldn’t relinquish its grip?” I didn’t want to launch into the story of the time I had to be hospitalized because I hypochondriacally believed I was in the throes of a heart attack because the story was too involved and I had told it too many times and it was starting to sound apocryphal.
“Heck,” she said, the publicist in her anxious to find a solution to everything, “I’ll meet you in Florida and fly back with you and hold your hand. I’ll go on the damn cruise with you if you want. It’s thirty thousand a person, Miles! They’re putting you up in one of their better suites, offering a ten thousand honorarium, view of the ocean . . .”
The thought of spending two weeks with Marcie on a Mexico/Central America cruise made my eyes bulge a little. Sure, two weeks playing golf and basking in the sun on a luxury boat did sound tempting. But then I worried that it would just turn into another one of those boozy affairs that go on indefinitely. “I don’t know, Marcie, I’ll think about it.”
“As the enrichment lecturer you might meet that wealthy woman you’ve been looking for.”
I scoffed. “Love’s not in the offing for me, Marcie. Once these women get past the allure of the whole Shameless phenomenon, they discover this insecure guy who can’t fly, is afflicted with frequent panic attacks, drinks too much, and is an inveterate commitment-phobe. I’m just too messed up.”
“A woman would do you a world of good,” she advised.
I took a sip of my wine and grew reflective. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But Victoria just set the bar too high,” I finished wistfully.
“You’ve got to move on, Miles.”
“I know, I know. Let’s drop it.”
“Okay, so anyway,” she said, turning to other matters. “We’ve got the tasting at the Wine House next Wednesday, a second faculty dinner at your alma mater UCSD, then the Willamette Valley event the following week . . .”
I cut her off. “There’s been a change of plan.”
She looked up from her notes with consternation. “What? You can’t cancel, Miles. They’ve already done all this publicity around your coming and everything!”
“Celebrities cancel all the time, Marcie,” I said, with deliberate indifference just to rile her and get her jowls shaking.
She stiffened. “Jesus, Miles, you’re going to give me a damn heart attack!”
“I’m going, Marcie, okay? Relax. Okay?”
“So, what’s the change of plans?” she asked warily.
I told her the change of plans.
Her eyeballs bulged out like sprung headlights after a head-on collision. “Let me get this straight. You’re trading in a nice Amtrak trip, sleeper car, everything I arranged for you, to what? Rent some handicapped van? Pile in Jack”—she said it affectedly in a nasty way with a shake of the head—“your stroke-addled mother, who’s in a wheelchair, and . . . a . . . Filipina caretaker?”
“And my mother’s precious Yorkie, if I can get him back.”
Marcie laughed so long and loud, when she was done her face looked like Baked Alaska with two maraschino cherries for eyes. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Marcie? I didn’t know you used the F-word.”
“Unlike you, I save it for when it’s really meaningful.”
“Why does everyone keep asking me if I’m out of my mind?” I raised my nearly empty sommelier’s glass. “Could you bring me that bottle?” I said.
Marcie ignored my request. Instead, she reached for the hotel phone and dialed room service. “I’d like to get some eggs, bacon and toast and coffee up here ASAP,” she said brusquely to whomever was on the other end of the line.
“I’m not hungry,” I said to Marcie.
“You need to get something in your stomach, Miles,” the mother in her admonished, jabbing a finger in the air at me. “And you need to fucking rethink this cockamamie trip of yours.”
“I need to get out, Marcie. And I want to do this for my poor mother.”
At the mention of my mother, she cut short her remonstrations about my “cockamamie” trip. “So, you’ll still do the event I set up at Justin Winery?”
“Absolutely. It’s on the itinerary.” I tipped my head back and chugged the rest of the wine in the glass as she, a teetotaler, looked on, aghast.
Marcie, still shaking her head, rose cumbrously from her chair and left. I got out my iPhone and logged onto the Net. Went to YouTube, typed in my name. And there it was: my boozy emcee speech, complete with my pouring a spit bucket over my head and the audience erupting into laughter. It was as if I were looking at a ghost of myself. Total mortification descended on me; more wine assuaged me.