“I WON’T FORGIVE YOU
IF YOU DON’T.”
I’d already jettisoned everything I owned that might remind me of Elizabeth, including, but not limited to, framed photos, clothing, Facebook friends, a New England Patriots coffee mug, a candle holder, a fake plastic tree (big Radiohead fans), concert ticket stubs, a stuffed hippopotamus, a bright red sombrero, two sets of silk sheets we bought at a flea market, several cast-iron skillets, an American flag snuggie, an old rusted-out beach cruiser, and Buna, our two-and-a-half-year-old pit bull–Labrador retriever mix. Okay, I didn’t outright get rid of Buna. I gave her to a friend to look after. One of the many wonderful things about dogs is that they don’t hold grudges. Maybe.
I set up an auto-reply on the e-mail account I use for work. It read, simply, “Gone fishing.” A bit cryptic, sure, but at this point I didn’t give a shit. I was unplugging. Off the grid. Taking the blue pill and exiting the Matrix. Totally and completely. Except for my cell phone. And my laptop. And my iPad. I’m not some kind of savage.
My total net worth at the time was approximately $19,000, that being about what you’d get if you totaled up the resale on the aforementioned gadgets, the bluebook value of the rust bucket I’d be living out of for the foreseeable future, and the portion of the “advance” for this book that they actually give you in advance (i.e., around $17). If that wasn’t enough to see me through to Pebble Beach, I figured I could always put some Brian in small Baggies and sell him to high school kids as smack. Just doing my part to keep America’s youth off drugs.
It was September 2014, but a more accurate start date for this little adventure would be July 26, 2010. That was the day, on a United Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, when I met Elizabeth.
I was in a window seat on the left side of the 737, using a page of the in-flight magazine as a nonthreatening focal point. A sight for sore eyes. The guy in the aisle seat of my row was, to put it mildly, a blimp. It was something of a production for him to pry himself loose to clear a path for her.
I glanced over as she slid into her seat and she threw me the kind of smile that makes you believe that no matter how much shit has hit the fan, life doesn’t stink. The kind that never leaves you, even if the person with the smile does. Well, look at that, I thought, as Elizabeth reached up and delicately adjusted the air vent. Finally, definitive proof that the universe was hell-bent on fucking with me. Here was probably the prettiest woman I’d ever laid eyes on, smooshed up against me on a cross-country flight, and I was in no mental shape whatsoever to do anything about it. This, of course, cracked Brian up like you wouldn’t believe.
He needed the humor. Poor guy was just a week or so out from being incinerated, along with the last shreds of my faith in the basic fabric of human existence. His first postdeath appearance was at his own funeral, naturally, and the hagiography perpetrated upon him by the more creative revisionists of my family amused him to no end. He heckled each homily about his character into my ear with a more accurate interpretation followed by a series of raucous guffaws. According to my family, in his all-too-brief life, Brian had been adventurous (“You mean I’d drink anything on a bet?”), brave (“stupid”), loyal (“if my friend’s in a bar fight, I’m in a bar fight”), and kind (“I always told women I was an asshole right when we met, so they wouldn’t be surprised later”). My laughter didn’t endear me to my family, more than one of whom inquired during the reception whether I was getting all the “help I needed” out there in L.A.
And, yes, Brian found my predicament on the plane highlarious. Because he’s a dick. (“Best dick ever,” Brian would like you to know.) For most of the flight Elizabeth and I sat silently beside each other, me earbudded into a playlist of the most woebegone music ever recorded, her reading Under the Tuscan Sun. It wasn’t until the final descent into Los Angeles, during my seventeenth listen through U2’s “Love Rescue Me,” that she tapped me on the shoulder and said the words that would alter the course of my life forever: “The flight attendant wants you to turn off the iPod.”
I immediately recognized this for what it clearly was: a sign that Fate had intervened. Then she smiled again, and in that moment looked so lovely and warm and happy and peaceful—so everything opposite of what I was feeling—that I thought I might rip in two.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“No,” I said without hesitation because it was the goddamn truth, her beatific smile notwithstanding. Two weeks earlier, my brother drowned his sorry ass about four Frisbee tosses away from my apartment. This may shock you, but when your brother’s dead body is pulled out of the water six days after he goes missing, it’s really no fun at all. I have seen my share of unthinkable tragedy in my life. I have been Around the Block. And this middle finger in the eye from the universe had utterly dismantled me.
And now Brian was daring me to talk to her. “Come on! Don’t be a dick,” he taunted. “Poor little woobie-wuss can’t talk to a girl just because his poor wubbie wubbins brother died. Awwww . . . The poor widdle wubbins.” This was rich, coming from someone who I’d seen call in sick to work after stubbing his pinkie toe. “Just talk to her,” he repeated, implacable. “Look at her! Seriously? I won’t forgive you if you don’t.”
So I did. And somehow Elizabeth and I struck up a conversation. And over the next few weeks formed a friendship that blossomed into romance. From the very first kiss, there was no doubt in my mind that I’d met the woman I was destined to marry. At my absolute nadir, while, in fact listening to a song called “Love Rescue Me,” love had indeed come to rescue me. And I had my dead brother, my spectral wingman, to thank. Elizabeth was my salvation, my reason to believe. She was, to put it in simplistic romcom terms, the One.
Four years later, however, she was the One who walked out of my life for good, claiming she needed to go “find herself.” No, seriously. The first few weeks after Elizabeth decamped, leaving me with only Facebook updates of her Frances Mayes–like romps around various sun-kissed climes, were brutal. I holed up in my apartment with the curtains drawn blasting “Love Rescue Me” over and over again, in the hope that it would somehow summon her to tell me I needed to shut down all electronic devices for landing. Brian, for his part, just sat on the couch pouring himself tequila after tequila and laughing at my sorry ass. (“World’s best dick, dude! And you’re just the asshole I want to fuck with.”)
Not to ruin the suspense or anything, but she didn’t show. The only thing I managed to summon was my irate neighbor, pounding on the walls in the middle of the night, imploring me to turn down the music and suggesting I attempt several unnatural sex acts. The fact that I found this vaguely comforting is testament to my desperate state.
A few weeks later, as I was packing my SUV to leave for good, he came out to get his car. This was our exchange:
“Going somewhere?”
“You might say that.”
“Where ya headed?”
“Nowhere.”
“Cool. Have fun.”
He was real broken up about me moving out.
It was September. The Pebble Beach Food & Wine festival was in April. I had seven months to transform myself from a dismantled, heartbroken schlub who barely knew the difference between Merlot and Meritage, into a confident connoisseur capable of wowing the surrounding population simply by swirling some fermented grape juice around in my mouth and pronouncing it “troubling, yet brilliant.” If I pulled it off, well, frankly, I’d still have to get my shit together. If I failed, it would be the end of my charmed road of freeloading off the ample teats of the world’s biggest liquor companies. Which is to say, the end of my career as a booze journalist.
Cool. Have fun.