Sideways

Two old friends set out for a weeklong romp through Santa Ynez, Calif., wine country that comically strains their friendship in Pickett's lively debut.

Smart, hapless narrator Miles is divorced and broke, and his novel's been rejected all over town. His handsome, "ursine" best friend, Jack, a successful actor, is about to get married, and wants to enjoy a few last days of freedom. Pickett gleefully chronicles their many minor adventures, including the oversexed Jack's attempts at getting laid, a boar-hunting episode and a staged car accident. Add to that massive amounts of wine: oenophile Miles swills rather than sips, and Jack's always been a party guy. While Jack works his charm on the ladies, Miles has his own flirtation with a lovely waitress.

Miles can be a delightful narrator, but he's no prince: he's a bore when it comes to wine, for example, and he can get a little pseudophilosophical ("photos mock the present by staring back at us with their immutable luster of our youthful past"). He also thinks nothing of snatching a couple thousand dollars from his alcoholic mother on her birthday. But redemption for all is promised and Pickett takes his readers on a jolly ride. His novel sounds like a perfect buddy flick, and indeed, it will have its chance:

T
he sun poured bright parallelograms of mote-swirling light through the venetian blinds of my rundown, rent-controlled house in Santa Monica. I was moving frenetically from bedroom to living room packing for a road trip with my best friend, Jack Cole. We were headed for the Santa Ynez Valley and a week of wine tasting before he was to be married the following Sunday. Though I couldn’t afford this impromptu excursion, I desperately needed to get out of L.A. The place was suffocating me, fueling paralyzing panic attacks that had been a chronic affliction of mine over the years.

The phone rang, but the number that materialized on my caller ID didn’t register so I stood frozen over the answering machine, waiting.

“Miles, is Roman,” my landlord began in his Transylvanian-sounding drawl. “It is the fifteenth of September and I still not receive rent. Every month we go through this. If I don’t get check by tomorrow I have no choice but to begin eviction.

I levered the volume on the answering machine to 0, the hair on my forearms tingling. The rest of Roman’s exhortation I could recite from memory. He would warm up with how lenient he had been, then he would launch into a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe about how my financial shortcomings were the cause of his elevated blood pressure and a host of other onuses that daily racked him on the property owner’s cross. His jeremiads were worthy of Job and their intent was to make me feel guilty and scrape together the $850 in question.

I resumed packing, the call pecking away at the edges of my already frayed psyche. Into my travel-scarred suitcase I threw a couple of bleak-themed novels I knew I would never crack. For good measure I added
The Oxford Companion to Wine,
Jancis Robinson’s brilliant and exhaustive tome on everything you ever wanted to know about the universe of wine. It was the perfect book to calm the nerves at three in the morning when you wake in an unfamiliar motel room in a cold sweat, trembling from excess. After all, Jack and I were journeying to wine country, and I wanted to have the one book that had supplied me with all the basics of my one undying passion—besides, of course, the unrepentant penning of two unpublished novels and scores of unproduced screenplays.

As I was about to shutter the house the phone rang a second time, jangling my nerves. I raced over to the caller ID, expecting it to be my disgruntled landlord again, amplifying on his first message with another warning salvo. But the number that came up on the display was a 212 area code so I lunged for the phone. “Hello,” I answered breathlessly.

“Miles,” sang a cheery woman’s voice. “It’s Evelyn, your favorite agent.” She was the sixth in a long line of backstabbing sharks, but so far she seemed to be the rare exception: an agent who believed in me.

“Evelyn, what’s up? You sound upbeat for a change.” In fact, she had that uncharacteristic lilt in her voice that promised argosies, ships of fortune that would diminish the pain of the thirty-five rejection letters from the who’s who of major publishing houses that I had arrayed on my living room walls: a festoon of failure, I proudly told everyone.

“Some
potentially
good news,” Evelyn said. “Richard Davis at Conundrum liked your book.”

My jaw dropped. The novel she was referring to had been shopped around New York for nearly a year now with no takers. There had been the first tier of submissions to the cream of the crop, when excitement was high and optimism exaggerated. Then there was the second tier: less prestigious houses, which meant less advance money, and considerably less budget for promotion once I got published, which I still assumed I would. The slow morphine drip continued as more rejection letters sluiced through Evelyn’s New York office and were shunted to me in L.A. Bringing up the rear was the third tier: boutique houses on the periphery seeking a home run and a move into the second tier. Short of vanity presses and the Internet self-publishing venues, this was where Evelyn disembarked and moved on to the BBD—bigger and better deal. We were clinging to tattered ribbons and we both knew it.

“Great,” I replied, almost not wanting to hear the qualifications for fear they would put a damper on my excitement.

“He’s passing it to the other senior editors to read over

“Of course,” I replied. “A publishing deal would certainly have that galvanic effect on me.”

Evelyn laughed heartily, the gallows laugh of a hard-working agent who wasn’t getting any younger. “So, we’re in pretty good shape,” she said. “I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

“Terrific,” I replied, glancing at my watch. “I’m getting ready to take off for a little trip.”

“Oh? Where?”

“Santa Ynez Valley. An hour north of Santa Barbara. The poor man’s Napa/Sonoma. My friend Jack is getting married and we’re going to go out in style. It’s research for my next book,” I added.

“Sounds like a blast,” she said. “Are you writing anything new, Miles?”

“Well, um,” I began haltingly. I glanced around at the rejection letters thumbtacked to my walls, their stinging words glaring reminders of why I had been unproductive recently. Of course, there was also the divorce, the dwindling bank account, the renewed wave of panic attacks, the loss of my film agent to the St. Vitus’s dance, and the sudden departure of a short-lived girlfriend who couldn’t put up with my occupational moodiness. “I’ve got something brewing,” I said finally. “Something epic.”

“Well, keep writing,” she encouraged. “And I’ll call you when I hear something.”

We signed off and I stood still for a moment, a hundred thoughts crisscrossing in my head. I had almost given up the book for dead—two years down the toilet and all the bad debts that backed up with it—but I was thrilled Evelyn

I locked up my house, threw my suitcase into the back of my Toyota 4Runner, and headed off to the weekly Friday afternoon wine tasting at Epicurus, where I was to rendezvous with the incorrigibly late Jack.

Epicurus was a long railcar-shaped wine emporium wedged in between a mattress store and a spa that specialized in high colonics. Wine bottles were racked halfway up both walls and down the middle of the long rectangular space, arranged according to varietal and country of origin.

The familiar crowd was packed into the small cordoned-off tasting area, affectionately dubbed The Bullpen, in the rear of the shop. In recent years The Bullpen had been witness to many wild Fridays after the owner had gone home, leaving the store entrusted to James, his English wine guru. Usually James would uncork bottle after bottle, recklessly cherry-picking the store’s inventory in retaliation for what he referred to as his
insulting
salary. It was the place to be on Friday for the Westside wine cognoscenti.

This afternoon they were pouring Gary Farrell, a high-end vintner whose winery is smack in the middle of the Russian River Valley. Pinot Noir country.
My
grape. The one varietal that truly enchants me, both stills and steals my heart with its elusive loveliness and false promises of transcendence. I loved her, and I would continue to follow her siren call until my wallet—or liver, whichever came first—gave out.

There was a buzz in The Bullpen when I arrived. A few people called out hellos and waved as I squeezed into the small space and found a clean glass. Most of the regulars were already holding court in their customary positions,

“Miles,” Carl called out, raising his glass, already flush

“Gary Farrell, are you kidding?” I said as I elbowed my way over to the lineup. Manning the bottles was a matronly woman with a pie-shaped face and a friendly but strained smile. As disembodied arms snaked in between jostling bodies she tried to monitor the amounts that were being poured. It usually began politely, then slowly deteriorated into a help-yourself-to-all-you-can-drink line of attack. We were still in the polite phase of the afternoon when I held out my glass to her.

“Would you like to begin with the Chardonnay?” she asked over the din of voices.

“Absolutely,” I said.

She picked up an open bottle of the Farrell Sonoma and poured me a splash. I put my nose in the glass, inhaled deeply, and got a whiff of honeydew and underripe pears. On the palate the wine was indelicate, slightly oaky, very tropical-fruity, a little on the flabby side: a fairly typical California Chard for the Chard-swilling masses. I compared notes with Carl and he readily agreed.

As I waited for Jack, I edged my way nearer the three women who were making their first appearance. They were deep into the reds and I sensed they were getting ready to head for the hills.

“What do you think of the Farrells?” I asked the one in the middle, a pretty, dark-haired slip of a girl.

“Mm.” She wrinkled her forehead. “I guess I like the Merlot the best.” Her pals concurred with her assessment, nodding and
mmm
-ing.

I grimaced. Merlot, a quintessential blending grape, when left to its own devices almost always—Pétrus notwithstanding—results in a bland, characterless wine.

“I didn’t like ’em.” She formed her mouth into a tight little O trying to describe her displeasure with my favorite grape.

Disenchanted, I backed my way toward the lineup of bottles, sensing I had struck out. As the crowd shifted and reshifted in the cramped space, I quickly sampled the second Chard, a single-vineyard wine with a better balance of fruit and acidity and subtler oak overtones that imparted a slightly smoky, almost nutty taste.

“Excellent,” I said to the wine rep, when she asked if I liked it. I rinsed my glass and held it back out. “Let’s get serious.”

She reached for the first Pinot and poured me a splash. It was Farrell’s Sonoma standard, blended from a selection of vineyards. It gave off that unmistakable Pinot nose of cassis and blackberry, but it wasn’t distinguished, drifting in the mouth like a rudderless boat. The second Pinot was a single-vineyard from the nearby storied Rochioli property. It had notes of cardamom and exotic berries, and it pinwheeled around on my palate, deliciously lingering.
Mm,
I thought to myself, rolling the wine around in my mouth,
this is more like it.

I shuffled my way through the crush of bodies back to where the three neophytes were winding up with the Cabs, hoping for one last shot. I was beginning to feel a little high and it emboldened me to re-approach them.