We rode through LA as the vast city hummed with cars and their harried drivers scurried helter-skelter in every direction to make a living, or a name, for themselves. It was refreshing not to get off at the 10 Freeway and be heading back to Santa Monica and my own minefield of worries.
Jack and I kept our sippy cups half full. Somewhere inside me I realized we were rolling the dice, but both of us had built up such a tolerance to the grape we needed the medicating libations to maintain our sangfroid. As long as we kept it under control, I believed we could manage it. And there was no way I was going to get Jack or myself to go cold turkey on the trip.
My mother’s voice piped up from the back. “What’re you drinking up there, Miles?”
“Just a little water, Mom.”
“Oh, that’s a lot of horse muffins,” she retorted. “I bet it’s wine.”
“Okay, just a little, uh, Pinot. Jack and I have had a long morning,” I said in a rising tone, over the roar of the engine.
“Can I have a glass of wine, please?”
“Mom, you have to wait till we get to Buellton. We have a nice dinner planned for you. You’ll get two glasses of the finest Chardonnay”—her favorite variety and the only one she would ever drink—“I don’t want you passing out on me, okay?”
“I’m not going to pass out,” she bristled.
“Let’s wait until Buellton.”
“It’s not fair that you get wine and I don’t.”
“Mom, in an hour, we’ll be at the Marriott and I’ll open you the finest Chardonnay and I’ll get you straightened out, okay?”
“It’s five o’clock.” She was a five o’clock drinker like her first-born, Hank. She never took a drop before five, but right on the dot, she had a glass, then, until her stroke, quite a few more.
“I know it’s five, Mom, but now that you’re out of Las Villas the imbibition rules have changed. We may go wine tasting in the morning, we may not start until late. We’re on a whole new schedule now.”
“I’m nervous.”
I turned and looked her squarely in the eyes, hoping to dispel her apprehensions. “Jack, Joy, and I are going to take care of you, okay?”
“Okay,” she demurred. “You promise?”
“Yes.”
“Phyllis,” Jack roared. “You’re in good hands.”
I shot Jack a look as if to say, Let me handle this.
I turned back to my querulous mother. “When we get up there, we’ll get freshened up, and hustle you out to dinner ASAP.”
“That’s good news. You promise?”
“I promise. I don’t want you coming down with the vapors.”
My mother chuckled at the word vapors. “Oh, I won’t,” she said. “I don’t get depressed like you, Miles.”
“No one does.” To quiet my mother I produced a CD folder from the drinks console and selected Harry Belafonte’s Greatest Hits, slipped it into the CD player and adjusted the volume. At the sound of Belafonte’s mellifluous voice, and the first of his sappy hits, I watched my mother’s reaction. When she heard her favorite musician start singing his signature track, “The Banana Boat Song,” she tapped her index finger against an imaginary object and said, “Oh, Harry. He was fantastic.”
“Are you happy, Mom?”
Her eyes pinched closed and it looked like she was going to start crying again. “This is the best day of my life.”
As the lyrics came in over the melody, Jack sang boisterously along, his voice a shockingly beautiful baritone:
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Day, me say day, me say day, me say day
Me say day, me say day-o
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Work all night on a drink of rum
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Stack banana till de mornin’ come
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Come, mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Come, mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
When the chorus started up, Jack raised his voice and sang in a booming tone, turning frequently to serenade my enchanted mother:
Lift six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
My mother broke into song only when Belafonte sang, “Daylight come and me wan’ go home.” There was something sad in the way she croakily harmonized with Harry’s dulcet crooning, as if “The Banana Boat Song” was going to become the anthem for the last journey of her life.
In the smog-choked Valley, we merged onto the 101 and continued north in the direction of Santa Barbara, moving against the prevailing traffic and making good time. The sun began to bend off to the west and the blue sky was striated with apricot-colored clouds that looked like gigantic pennants suspended in deep space.
“Are you going to call Maya when we get up there?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She was kind of cold to me on the phone the last time I spoke with her. I guess when the movie came out I sort of went off and did my own thing and . . . Plus, she’s not going to move to LA because she’s got her own little boutique winery thing going, and I’m certainly not going to move up there because all I’d do is get drunk and pick up groupies at the Hitching Post.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Jack asked.
I smirked and shook my head. “I’m sure it’d get old real fast. Then, in no time, I would become a local joke. I’m trying to move on, Jackson. I’m trying to shed this past, but it keeps pulling me down.”
Jack, no doubt eager to discourage my introspection, tacked: “So, Terra’s really doing lap dances in Reno?”
“That’s what I gleaned, yeah. You drove her into a life of prostitution, Jackson.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You had that girl’s head turned totally around during that crazy week.”
“She had my head turned totally around. I almost blew off the wedding.”
“Which, in retrospect, might have been the best thing that could have happened to you.”
“But then I wouldn’t have had Byron,” he said, a little wistfully.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” my mother barked from the back.
“All right, Mom,” I said. “We’ll take the next exit.” I turned to Jack: “This is going to be a pretty frequent occurrence. She takes some powerful diuretics for her edema. Just so you know.”
“That’s cool,” Jack said. “If Phyllis’s got to go, she’s got to go.” He turned around and, his mood lifted by the wine he’d been sipping, said to my mother over the music. “All right, Phyllis. Pit stop coming up. Time to rinse a kidney.”
In Ventura, I directed Jack to a turnoff I was familiar with and he braked at a gas station mere yards from the off-ramp. Joy slid open the side door and, after I had pulled the ramp out from the undercarriage, wheeled my mother out. Snapper leapt out of the van and took off running.
“Snapper! Snapper!” my mother screamed. “Get back here!”
Snapper, hearing her familiar voice, came to a sliding stop, lifted his leg and urinated on the tire of a parked car, and then sprinted back, panting excitedly.
My mother turned to Joy and reproached her. “You can’t let him out like that. He has to be on his leash.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Raymond.”
“Mom, it wasn’t her fault. She was hired to take care of you, not Snapper.”
“He could have died,” she cried. Snapper was now back in the van with the door closed and his bladder blissfully relieved.
“Well, everything’s fine now. Just relax, Mom, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry, Joy.”
Joy, ever patient, wheeled my mother off in search of the service station’s bathroom.
I maneuvered the van next to one of the pumps and took the pit stop opportunity to top off the tank. Jack had wandered off and lit a cigarette, a nasty habit he had broken at Babs’s behest, but now was back to chipping away at.
As I refueled, I noticed Joy emerging from the bathroom and discreetly lighting a joint. She took a couple puffs off it, then disappeared back inside the bathroom. Once we had done our business and sated our various vices, we all congregated back in the van and continued up the 101 in the direction of the Santa Ynez Valley.
The sky colored a darker shade of blue as we passed through Santa Barbara and drew closer to the destination of our journey’s first leg. Hugging the 101, and directly off to our left, the immense Pacific, with its mottled whitecaps, took on the appearance of crumpled tin foil struck by bright light. Eventually, the 101 curved away from the ocean and, just before the town of Buellton, we bore through the same tunnel the characters had in the movie.
“Life imitates art,” I mused to Jack.
“I hope not,” Jack said, drawing laughter from me.
As we crested the Santa Ynez Mountains and coasted the final few miles toward Buellton, night was just starting to descend. As always, whenever I came to pay a visit, the valley, with its beautiful rolling hills and unpolluted skies and swaths of vineyards, brought me a certain serenity.
Jack pulled into the Marriott, which fronts the 101, and I got out to check in. The clerk at the reception desk recognized my name and was all atwitter. On the desk were stacks of the Shameless wine map, a tourists’ guide to many of the locations in the movie. The local chamber of commerce had quickly pounced on its notoriety in a shameless run of greedy self-promotion. The young, blushing woman assigned us two adjacent rooms on the top floor. I went back out to the Rampvan. The air bore a slight chill now and I was feeling refreshed, looking forward to dinner and wine at the Hitching Post.
I approached Jack, smoking, and said, “Okay, here’s the deal. They don’t allow pets. So, you’re going to put Snapper in this tote bag I brought. In it you’ll find a sweatband. I want you to put that over his snout so he doesn’t start barking his fool head off.”
“Okay,” Jack said, dropping his cigarette to the asphalt and extinguishing it with a twist of his shoe.
“We’ll get my mom settled in and then we’ll head over to the Hitching Post.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Check this out,” I said, handing him one of the tourist maps.
Jack glanced at it. “These fuckers were all over this one with their PR, weren’t they?”
“This place has changed forever, I’m told. A friend of mine came up a couple of months ago and said it was a madhouse at the Hitching Post. But we have a table.”
“Excellent.”
Joy wheeled my mother from the van as Jack and I hauled out the bags. A bell captain loaded them onto a luggage trolley. As Jack stayed back to park the van and sneak Snapper inside, I escorted Joy and my mother to their suite.
“You okay, Mom?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Not too tired to go out to dinner?”
“Oh, no.”
“Because we could order in for you.”
“No,” she said sharply. “I want to go out. I want to live. I don’t care if I die choking on a nice big T-bone steak!”
I laughed. “That food in Las Villas was pretty bad, huh?”
“Oh, you don’t know. That would have killed me before my heart gave out.”
I laughed and gave her shoulder a little squeeze. We were all in an ebullient mood, the way being in a picturesque new setting with star-riddled skies and foreign smells gives one the sense of newness, discovery.
Joy and my mother disappeared inside their special handicapped room.
Inside my expansive room I opened another one of the Willamette Pinots, an ’08 Bergström, and poured two glasses in the Riedel sommelier’s glasses I had brought along for the trip. Wineglass in hand, I drifted out onto the small concrete patio and took a seat in an all-weather chair. The 101 traffic roared in opposing directions on the other side of the large swimming pool that glowed turquoise in the encroaching dark. I would have preferred a B&B in the middle of nowhere, but my mother felt more comfortable in the concrete wombs of the more corporate hotels. With her infirmity, it was probably a prudent course. My thoughts strayed. After a half a glass of wine, an unadulterated peace invaded me, rushed in and cushioned my soul. It had been a tough road to this penthouse suite. My journey was by no means over, but I felt like I had crested some kind of professional hill and now, if nothing else, was enjoying the ride back down to the quotidian sphere.
A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door, accompanied by a familiar booming voice. I let Jack in and poured him a glass before he commandeered the bottle and we repaired to the patio. In reverential silence, we watched the sun lower to the horizon and slip lyrically away to the other side of the world.
“You got Snapper in okay?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Fucker bit me.” He glowered at his finger and then shook it.
“That’s why they named him Snapper. Chomp chomp.”
“Great,” Jack said. “Thanks for the warning. Ten days with that little lap shark, huh? I might have to petition for a raise.”
“You’re already overpaid,” I said. “That wine in your glass is worth a double sawbuck alone.”
He drained his Riedel and said, “Good. In that case, I’ll have another.”
From where we were seated, we could see the sign for the Days Inn where we used to stay. “There’s the Windmill,” I said, gesturing and nostalgically calling the place by its former name.
Jack looked over. “Oh, yeah. Those were the days.”
“I like Windmill Inn better. Sort of more appropriate for the kitschy Solvang motif.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Jack said. “Man, it seems like yesterday we took that trip.”
“Yeah,” I said, reflecting back with him. “Remember that time I came back to the room and you and Terra were going at it like marmots?”
“Don’t remind me,” Jack said. “That chick was smoking hot. I’ve never had better sex in my entire life.”
“It’s probably because you were about to get married and you knew that it wasn’t going to be anything serious.”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “Yeah, probably it wouldn’t have lasted.” He turned to me and said with a grimaced expression, “She’s really a stripper in Reno?”
“That’s the scuttlebutt in the tasting rooms. People up here know what everyone’s doing, who they’re fucking, how much they’re drinking. I’ve got to be careful.”
“Terra’s not in the wine business anymore?”
I shook my head. “Pussy for cash. That’s the word.”
Jack visibly winced and shook his head, no doubt a succession of prurient images suddenly menacing him. “Man.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t get crab lice and pass ’em to Babs.”
“The chick was follically challenged. What would crabs clamp onto?”
I laughed. “And you were going to blow off your wedding and were trying to inveigle me to move up here with you and start a winery! Fuck, man, you had flipped your pons.”
Jack sipped the Pinot he had refreshed his glass with, smacked his lips and furrowed his brow. “I said that?”
“Yeah. And you were fucking serious. I mean, I knew you were out of your coconut, but you presented it to me in a way that was so genuine I was almost swayed by your lunatic logic.”
“Hmm,” Jack said.
“I mean, new pussy does that. When I had the affair that broke up my marriage, I was so out of my mind over this stupid little nothing D-girl it wasn’t funny. I mean, I thought I was behaving reasonably normally, given the crazy circumstances, but in retrospect I was out of my freaking gourd. New pussy is like the call of the Sirens, Lorelei beckoning sailors to their doom.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. I sensed that he was traveling back in his mind to what wrecked his marriage; a trace of lament and remorse had crept into his voice. “Yeah. New pussy. They ought to put a warning label on it.”
“Like that would do any good. God really fucked us with that one, didn’t he? Gave us this turbo-charged sex drive to ensure the propagation of the species, but didn’t count on modern civilization and the fact that we don’t need it anymore. But here we are, stuck with it. It’s driving us crazy.”
The orange bled out of the sky and the empyrean purpled. Owing to the scarcity of ambient light, stars broke out like fireflies on a summer night in the Midwest and coruscated in the darkness. I kept flipping my iPhone over and over in my hand like a deck of cards. “I think I’m going to call Maya and invite her to the Hitching Post.”
“Excellent idea,” Jack said. “See if she has a friend.” I looked over at Jack and he met my dismayed expression. “Or maybe not.”
“Or maybe not. Jesus. That’s an understatement.” Shaking my head to myself, I found Maya’s number in my contacts and pressed Call. After five rings her voicemail intercepted the call. I listened to her familiar sultry voice until the beep sounded. “Hey, Maya, it’s Miles. I’m up here in Buellton. Going to head over to the Hitching Post in a bit. You’re welcome to join us if you’re free. Would love to see you and catch up. Take care.” I turned to Jack. “She was probably sitting there staring at her phone.”
“I doubt it,” Jack said. “I’ll bet you she shows.”
“Uh. I don’t think so.”
Jack suddenly held his wineglass up to his face. “What’s this wine we’re drinking? It’s delicious.”
“It’s an ’08 Bergström.” I didn’t bother to recite the vineyard because Jack didn’t care. I upended some more into my mouth. “It is good, isn’t it?”
“Excellent.”
“These Willamette wines are fucking impressive.”
There was a soft knock at the door. I got up from my chair, crossed the spacious room, and answered it. It was Joy. A shower and a change into a black sleeveless dress had left her positively transformed. Her bloodshot eyes betrayed a few more hits of pot and there was a suppressed giggle evident in her otherwise diffident expression. “Your mom’s all ready.”
“Okay,” I said.
“She wants a glass of wine now,” she said.
“I bet she does.” I went into the portable refrigerator and produced a bottle of Chardonnay, uncorked it, poured a glass, then went next door to placate my mother who, if she didn’t get her evening glass, would be unappeasable. I found her out on the patio with Snapper resting in her lap. I handed her the half glass of Chardonnay. She sipped it and a smile broadened across her face.
“Oh, I needed that,” she said.
I pulled up a chair next to her, placed a hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “How’re you doing, Mom?”
“Fine.” She sipped her wine with relish. Her endlessly shifting mood changed like the stock market.
“Excited?”
“Oh, yes.”
“It’s going to be a zoo at the Hitching Post tonight. Sure you want to go?”
“Stop asking that,” she reproved me.
“Sure you wouldn’t like to go somewhere more quiet?”
“No.”
“Okay. Just checking.”
“Do you have to put that sweatband over Snapper’s nose?”
“Mom, if management finds out we’ve got a dog in here they’ll kick us out. Do you want to stay at the Motel 6?”
“Oh, no,” she said, laughing.
“Or in a tent at a campsite?”
“Don’t joke me.”
“All right then, stop your bellyaching. Enjoy your wine.”
I rounded up our gang for a night of food and wine plundering. We abandoned Snapper to the room with the sweatband around his snout, climbed into the Rampvan and rode the short distance over to the Hitching Post. The parking lot was so full it was difficult to find a place to park. Something I had never seen before: a crowd of maybe twenty people clustered around the entrance waiting for their names to be called. The four of us threaded our way through them and went in the front door, my mother spearheading the charge in her wheelchair. The noise level inside was deafening. The maître d’ exclaimed: “Miles! Good to see you.”
“Nice to be back at the scene of the crime,” I shouted to her over the noise. I ducked around the corner and glanced into the bar. They were four deep! Packed in like sardines in a tin. Again, something never witnessed before at the Hitching Post, at least not by me. Shameless, like the maudlin Field of Dreams, had turned one of its key locations into a tourist-groupie magnet, drawing fans from all over.
I said to the maître d’ (whose name I was blanking on), “Jesus, I’ve never seen it like this before.”
“It’s your doing, Miles. You changed it all.”
“I didn’t. The movie did. But, whatever . . .”
She smirked at my modesty.
“I hope my lifetime certificate is good for four.”
“For you, the moon!”
We were escorted like royalty to a large center table. A chair was hauled away so Joy could slide my mother up to her place in her wheelchair. Jack took a seat and leaned back, hands behind his head, beaming, sizing up the possibilities. I got up to go to the bathroom. Jostling through the throng at the bar I cast about for a sign of Maya, but didn’t see her through the arms raised to get the attention of the beleaguered bartenders.
When I came out of the bathroom, a valley winemaker recognized me and leapt up from his coveted stool. “Miles. Good to see you.” He embraced me.
“Hey, Dick, how’s it going?” I shouted over the din. “How’re the grapes shaping up this year?”
“It’s going to be a good vintage. Here, you want to try something?” He motioned to the bartender who, seeing me, gave me a thumbs-up and quickly produced a wineglass and waved to me over the crowd. Dick poured me a half glass from an unlabeled bottle he had with him. I took a sip and sloshed it around in my mouth.
“Pretty powerful juice,” I said.
Dick, a little high on the stuff already, raised a hand in an effort to get everyone’s attention. “Hey, everyone,” he announced, “this is Miles Raymond. The guy who wrote Shameless.”
“Dick, Jesus,” I said. “I don’t need this.”
Dick had known me before the movie took off. “Have some fun with it, Miles.”
Heads turned. Within seconds, the crowd imploded on me. Cocktail napkins and business cards and matchbooks were thrust in my face for me to sign. I did my best to accommodate everyone, thinking that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have come to the most celebrated location in the movie. But then I had a lifetime free certificate, so . . . As I expected, a couple of attractive women wormed their way close to me. Women who wouldn’t have paid attention to me when I used to be a habitué of the unknown, unprepossessing joint this had once been. At the mention of Shameless it was as if ten years of wear and tear had been magically effaced from my true age. One of the women thrust a business card into my hand and said loudly, “Call me, Miles. I’m at the Days Inn.” Drunk out of her skullcap, she put her mouth next to my ear and whispered lewdly, “I want to fuck you into a coma.” She backed away and waited for my reaction.
“What’s your name?”
“Patricia.”
“Patricia. I’ll take the coma, but not the fuck. Thanks.”
“Oh, don’t be such a wet blanket, Mr. Famous Writer.”
I backed away through the crush of bodies.
“See you at the Days Inn later maybe,” she shouted over the din.
I just smiled wryly at her and finally broke free from the autograph hounds and elbowed my way back into the main dining room. A special magnum of the Hitching Post’s signature Pinot, the Highliner, had already found its way to the table and Jack was filling glasses for everyone. My mother wasn’t really a fan of red wine—she said it was sour. So I summoned our waitress over—it wasn’t Maya, of course—and ordered her a glass of Alma Rosa Chardonnay, which I knew she would like.
“Where’d you go, Miles?” Jack asked.
“It’s fucking nuts in the bar. Some winemaker recognized me so I had to sign some autographs.” I produced the business card from my front shirt pocket. “You want to get laid? Here you go.” I handed Jack the card.
Jack glanced at the card. “Massage therapist. Shiatsu. Thai,” he read aloud. “Nice.” He smiled broadly. Things were picking up after the afternoon’s deplorable dognapping episode.
“She’s staying at the Days Inn. You can pretend she’s Terra.”
Jack smirked. “Dude, she wants you. Not me.”
“Tell her Miles sent you as his crackerjack replacement. I’m sure she’ll do you.”
Joy absorbed this badinage with bemusement. She was so shy and inexpressive it was hard to know what she was thinking.
As my mother jubilated in her Chardonnay, I said to Joy, “How do you like the wine?”
“I like it. No aftertaste.”
“No aftertaste? That’s it? Try another sip. Move it around in your mouth.” I sudsed the wine in my mouth to demonstrate.
She took another minuscule sip and tried to replicate what I had shown her. “It’s good. No aftertaste.”
“Okay,” I said, resigning myself to the fact her drug of choice was something you smoked, not drank.
The restaurant’s affable owner, Frank Ostini, bedecked in chef’s whites and wearing his iconic pith helmet, materialized at our table. His teeth shone white under his bushy moustache. He extended an arm and said, “Miles. Good to see you.”
I took his hand. “Likewise, Frank. Place is hopping.”
“Quadrupled the business.”
“When’re you buying your yacht?”
He laughed, obviously elated in the flush of a windfall that had he had his way, would never have happened.
“Remember when you tried to shut the film down because you thought the script romanticized over-imbibition?” I needled him.
“I do. Thank God they talked sense into me.”
“I mean, come on,” I teased. “You’re not in the mineral water business. Jesus. What were you thinking? Half the people up here are wine drunks.”
He scowled a moment at my jibe.
“By the way, thanks for the magnum. Highliner’s tasting better than ever.”
“You’re welcome. Can I take your orders?”
“Mom? What would you like?”
“I want a big steak.”
I gestured to my mother. “Frank, this is my mother. We’re headed to the International Pinot Noir Celebration in McMinnville, Oregon and then I’m taking her to Wisconsin and turning her over to her sister.”
Frank placed a caring hand on my mother’s shoulder. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Raymond.”
Tears formed in her eyes. “My son’s a big success.”
“Oh, that’s for sure,” replied Frank. “Huge.” My mother nodded, trying to ward off the tears. Frank squatted down next to her. “How would you like your steak?”
“Well done,” my mother replied. When we were growing up she cooked the shit out of everything, believing all meat was tainted with trichinosis.
Jack, Joy and I placed our orders and Frank, after showering me with more compliments, disappeared back into the kitchen.
My mother, tears still glassing her eyes, pointed a finger at me. “I always knew you would make it. Your father thought you were a loser, but I believed in you.”
“Thanks, Mom. Good to know Dad had thrown in the towel on me.” For a moment I grew wistful thinking about him. My father had wanted me to drop my artistic aspirations and come into the family business, selling commercial coin-op equipment to laundries and apartment complexes. Instead, I had moved to LA, where I had struggled mightily to find a toehold in the film business. I had borrowed heavily from him—and others—and though they had come through in my destitute years they had all urged me to get a real job. Now that my ship had come in, his untimely death—a massive stroke while he was undergoing a triple bypass had plunged him into an irreversible coma—weighed heavily. He would have been so proud to see me gain this level of recognition. It would have vindicated me in his eyes, effaced years of often-mutual animosity over the fact I hadn’t used my college degree in the pursuit of something that would pay the bills. Well, I was paying the bills now! I remembered having to appear alongside my poor mother in front of a medical ethics board at a V.A. hospital and implore them not to let my father waste away on life-support. They agreed to pull his feeding tube, but, even then, it was three agonizing weeks before he officially died. It took a toll on my mother, and she suffered her devastating stroke less than a year and a half later. I looked over at her. She was ecstatic to be out of Las Villas de Muerte, sitting in a lively restaurant and drinking her treacly Chardonnay, and my heart went out to her. Hell, if she croaked on this trip, would that be the worst thing that could happen to her?
Jack refilled my glass, hoisting me out of my reverie. “What’s up, dude?” he asked, noticing I had dropped out of the conversation.
“I don’t know. I was just thinking what a bizarre little household we are here. You’re like my dissolute brother; Joy”—I patted her on the head—“the sister I never had and always longed for; and my mother, well, my mother. We’re the ultimate dysfunctional family.”
“You’re getting sentimental, Miles,” Jack said.
“No, I’m not.”
He shot me the look that said I was waxing specious, but shook his head and smiled.
The various courses came and we dug in. From time to time we were interrupted by someone wobbling over to the table to have me autograph something—cocktail napkins being the most popular. With her half-necrotic brain, my mother didn’t really comprehend what it all meant. She just knew that I was the center of attention, and that I had accomplished something momentous, the magnitude of which was lost on her. Joy, appearing prettier and prettier the more Pinot I consumed, would drop her gaze into her lap if I tried to make eye contact. Being in the Hitching Post, with all these people fawning, she understood that I was a celebrity of some ilk, but she seemed embarrassed by all the attention.
Near dinner’s end, my iPhone beeped. Wrestling it out of my pocket, I saw a notification for a text message. The text read: I’m at the Clubhouse if you want to have a drink-M.
“Who was that?” Jack asked, noticing my eyes narrow and my brow beetle.
“Maya. Wants to have a drink.”
“Are you going to meet her?”
“Yeah. Why not? Can you get Joy and my mom back to the Marriott?”
“No problem, dude.” He fingered the business card in his hand. “Hmm. Patricia. Sounds promising.”
“Why’s that?”
“Starts with a ‘p.’”
“You fucking dog, Jackson.”
After dinner I shook more hands, declining numerous importuning offers to hang out at the bar or decamp to another location for more wine. We gathered ourselves back in the Rampvan and took off.
Jack dropped me off at the entrance to the Clubhouse Bar, the cheerless watering hole at the former Windmill Inn. A major scene in the movie had been shot there and I was expecting another crowd, but when I ambled inside the place was relatively sedate. A few stragglers sat at the bar. A couple of locals, who looked like they would stab you to death for an hour’s pay, were shooting a game of pool.
I found Maya seated exactly on the same stool Jack and I had found her on years before when we met her here for a drink. A glass of red wine stood on the bar in front of her. Next to it was a bottle. Maya wouldn’t stoop to drink the paltry, and poorly chosen, selections on the Clubhouse’s list, so she usually brought her own and paid a corkage. Now that the Hitching Post was overrun every night, she likely preferred the solitude of the Clubhouse.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said, forcing a smile. She hadn’t changed much, but too many cigarettes and too many hours under the hot sun in her vineyard had conspired to produce crow’s-feet that crinkled at the corners of her large eyes. A dye job had lightened her hair, and it looked like she had lost a little weight since we had last seen each other.
I corkscrewed down on the stool next to her. We didn’t embrace, we didn’t kiss cheeks, we didn’t even shake. A tension had to be bridged before we could touch each other, so much had gone down since our meeting, the movie’s coming out, and my meteoric rise to my odd version of fame. Circumspection ruled over the short space between us as we tried to read each other through the subtlest of inflections.
“What’re you drinking here?” I said, reaching for the bottle on the bar and turning it so that the label faced me. “Ne Plus Ultra Wines. This your label?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“I like the name,” I said. Then, in what I thought was a humorous tone, I added, “I taught you that word, didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t,” she said caustically. “You’re such an asshole, Miles. Besides, it’s not a word, it’s a phrase, you philistine.”
“That’s true,” I quickly back-pedaled. “You’re right.” She turned away from me. “But,” I teased, “I believe I used it in my novel to describe what it was like to have sex with you.”
“Yeah. And now the whole valley knows what it’s like to have sex with Maya.”
“Sorry. I write from personal experience.”
She rolled a tongue over her front teeth. There was palpable hostility in that space between us now.
The bartender broke away from a baseball game on the overhead TV that had mesmerized his weary, brain-dead soul, and came over. “Would you like a glass?”
“Or you want me to drink straight from the bottle?”
Mirthlessly, he slid a glass from an overhead rack and set it in front of me. Maya proudly poured it half-full with her maiden Pinot. I took some into my mouth and sloshed it around like a wine professional. Maya expressionlessly waited for my assessment, no doubt braced for a trenchant critique.
“Where’re the grapes from?” I asked.
“This new vineyard north of Clos Pepe. First vinifiable harvest.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Nice?” she jumped on me. “That’s all you’re going to say?”
I took another sip. “It’s more than nice, Maya. It’s elegant. Like you.” She forced a smile. “And I appreciate the fact you’re going for something not so highly alcoholic. More Burgundian. Not one of those Syrah-laced Pinots that Bruno used to make.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“How many cases did you produce?”
“Only about a hundred.” She glanced at the bottle. “You really like it?”
“Yeah. I do. And not just because you made it, either. Makes a lot of these other valley Pinots pedestrian by comparison.”
She laughed. “Put it in your next book.”
It was kind of an odd sensation, after the scene at the Hitching Post, to have Maya hustling me. “If I write one, I will, I promise.”
She nodded. I nodded. We sipped her wine in silence. We were, as usual, avoiding talking about our history. Uncomfortable, I looked around the Clubhouse.
“It’s refreshing to see that the Shameless insanity hasn’t gripped this place in its steel vise. The Hitching Post looked like something out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I mean, I actually heard people quoting lines right out of the movie.”
“I know. You ruined it for all of us. I can’t go there anymore. It’s so crazy, Frank’s thinking of closing it one night a week and only letting locals in.”
“He should. Pour free Highliner. Be a goodwill gesture to the community.”
“So, you’re up here with your mom and Jack the asshole and . . .”
“And my mom’s caretaker. Oh, and my mom’s nasty little dog.”
At the picture of the four and a half of us Maya just shook her head. “How’s it going so far?”
“So far okay. One day down. Nine to go.” I smiled. “I brought plenty of wine.”
Another silence descended. We sipped. The bridge still needed another section. I wondered if more wine would complete the construction.
“How’s your new boyfriend?” I ventured.
“We’re just dating,” she said, her voice still serrated with an undertone of rancor.
“Dating seriously or . . . ?”
Maya simmered at the question. Then she picked up her glass and tossed the wine in it into my face. She swiveled off her barstool and strode outside. I forearmed the wine from my face and glanced in the direction she had fled. Maya hadn’t left. She was standing under the portico, a match illuminating her face as she lit a cigarette.
After a moment I got up slowly off my barstool and sauntered outside. I stood next to her. She wouldn’t meet my gaze. A chill had crept into the air, and it wasn’t just the ocean breezes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. She glared at the burning end of her cigarette, as if studying it. “Can I bum a cigarette?” She handed me her pack of American Spirits. I fingered one out and stuck it between my lips. She flicked a lighter aflame and I inhaled it until it glowed red. We warily observed each other out of our peripheral vision. The passing traffic on the 101 was light. Stars dotted the clear night sky. I should have been feeling on top of the world, but instead I was feeling a sinking despair. Women with whom I had a history often made me feel this way. If I’d gone to a headshrinker I’m sure he would have pointed out that this was a pattern with me: throw myself headlong into something, get high on wine and wax all passionate and romantic and tell them what they longed to hear—and actually feel it, too!—then wake from the hangover and gradually push them away. That’s what I had done with Maya, and now, out here in front of the Clubhouse Bar, where we had shared a number of wonderful times—God, I remember once kissing wildly and not caring who saw us—there was a tension as ugly as a barbed-wire fence.
“No one ever taught me how to deal with success. I’m sure you can be taught. I haven’t dealt with it well. I’ve alienated a lot of people. You know, obviously I have intimacy issues. And all the wine has clouded my judgment.” I took another drag on my cigarette. “And so I’m sorry that I blew you off and went off on . . .” I faltered, “. . . on this crazy, hedonistic journey to nowhere. I liked myself better before the movie, if you want to know the truth.”
She stamped out her cigarette, spit smoke, and looked at me for the first time with her dark, brooding eyes. “So did I,” she said. Then she reached both hands up and grabbed my head as if catching a hard-thrown football. She brought her mouth to mine in a savage kiss. Her voluptuous lips smashed against my face in a torrent of fury or passion or longing or some other emotion volcanically brewing inside her, taking me by surprise. She finally withdrew her mouth, but still clutched my head in her hands as if she were going to crush it. “I want to hate-fuck you so badly, Miles.” She brought her lips to mine again and kissed me like she wanted to devour me, not make love to me. “But I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.” With that, she pivoted in place and started off. Ten paces away from me she stopped and turned. “You know, Miles, I liked you so much better when you were a pathetic, pathological lying loser who couldn’t get his novel published and couldn’t get laid. You’re a different person now. So fucking full of yourself.” She shook her head disgustedly, then strode over to her black Jeep Cherokee, turned the engine over and roared off.
Desolate, I walked back into the Clubhouse. Maya’s half-empty bottle still sat perched on the bar. I poured a glass, debated calling Jack—I could guess where he was!—but decided against it, not wanting to get shanghaied into a long night at the Hitching Post.
I paid the corkage, tipped an obscene $100 so the bartender could invest in a new shirt, and left. Walking along a deserted stretch of 246 in the direction of the Marriott, I considered what a contemptible, smug jerk I had become, what a little gust of fame had engendered in me. And all it took was thirty minutes with Maya to evoke it. I missed her. I had her and I let her go. Now, like my marriage, it was over. No going back. God, I was miserable. I didn’t know what I had been expecting when I came to the Clubhouse, but I got hit upside the face, and it hurt. Hurt. Made me think of a line Kafka wrote in a letter to his Czech translator, Milena Jessenska: “You are the knife that I twist into myself.” Is it why I couldn’t love without always wanting to run away?
I stopped on the 101 overpass, jackknifed over the guardrail and stared at the red and white rivers of traffic. Naturally, Maya had been hurt by my pushing her away when the movie hit. I’m sure it wasn’t too difficult for her to go on the Internet, punch my name into Google, and find photos of me with different women at premieres and film festivals and awards shows. She’d heard me profess my love for her enough times to believe it. And now the only way she could express her deep-seated—and legit—resentment was to invite me for a drink, kiss me hatefully, then give me the middle finger and walk off forever. I felt lousy.
The 18-wheelers rumbled under me, heading north and south to drop-off destinations. A part of me wanted to join Jack and get obliterated, and another part of me just wanted to return to my hotel room and reflect on everything condemnable I had become.
I started off again slowly, my legs heavy. Here I was in the valley I had done a bit to help make famous and I was suddenly all alone, anonymous. It was a stark reminder of the future that awaited me. Fatalistic, okay, but I knew in my gut it was true.
The walk past a McDonald’s and a Motel 6 and a 4-plex showing Hollywood’s dregs was depressingly lonely. (Had I fantasized that Maya and I would laugh it all off and have a wild night in the bedroom? What a fool I was, I thought, for being so oblivious of how I had hurt her.) The hotel lobby was lonely. The slow-moving elevator—come on, already! Down the corridor back to my room. The room was lonely. I poured a glass of Pinot and lay on the bed. My cell rang. I was hoping it was Maya, but it was Jack. I didn’t pick up. A minute later I received a text message: “It’s happening, dude! It’s on!” I closed my eyes and fell into a disquieting sleep.
Jack barreled in around four a.m., complete with slamming door and thundering footsteps. He was loud and drunk and laughing, filling the room with his presence. He turned on the light, annoying me.
“Jesus, Jack,” I said, jerking upright.
He found his wineglass and helped himself to a healthy pour. “Man, it was wild over at the Windmill.” He whistled. “Fucking chicks, man.” He pointed his glass at me. “They really wanted to meet you.”
“They didn’t want to meet me, they wanted to meet this shell of a man I’ve become,” I said, still irritated by the glaring light and Jack’s barely pre-dawn arrival.
Sensing my peevishness, he said, “How’d it go with Maya?”
“Ever heard of hate-fucking?”
“Heard of it. Not quite sure what it is. Probably how Byron was conceived.”
“She said she wanted to hate-fuck me, then she flipped me the bird and split.”
“Fuck, man, why didn’t you go back to the Hitching Post?”
“I was tired. And a little drenched with Maya’s maiden bottling. Did you get your nut? Pour me a glass, will you?”
Jack was happy to oblige. “Yeah, I got my nut,” he said, handing me the glass he had refreshed. “I think I promised her and her friend that we would take them wine tasting today. Hit all the locations in the movie.”
“Well,” I sighed, “that’s not going to happen.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
We stayed up talking and drinking until raw dawnlight was visible through the curtains, then split an Ambien and conked out.