I can’t believe how cool the working environment has been this harvest. It seems like all of our twisted personalities are not only welcomed but encouraged to take things to a more exaggerated level. Danny is a raging bisexual tomcat by now, Rebecca and her spandex pants are keeping the entire crew motivated, José Luis turns up in a different sizzling vehicle every morning, and Zach has the focus on fun and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which foreman Pancho Ibarra calls the “pinche verdes” (mainly because he blamed his swollen-footed gout on having tried one back in 2008). We’ve had a lot of long days and have processed three of the four vineyards, with the Narrows Vineyard looming down the line as the last pick of the year.
Quality is good but no one really cares. We’re too busy living and laughing. There’s a wedding that Molly has been after me to go to on October 23rd in LA. She’s one of the bridesmaids so I’d be at the weird table most of the time. She’s wanted me to commit to going since the first week we hung out, before I even officially worked for Goldeneye. I don’t plan anything during harvest. Some temps do. I’ve always felt it was beside the point and an aggravation to the winemaker. But last night Molly really put the offer on the table: “If you drive down to see me next weekend and go to Katie’s wedding, it’ll mean a lot and I’ll stop bugging you.” I admire her assertiveness and she will surely get fucked by somebody in what she calls her “Boobie Bridesmaid Dress,” but it won’t be me. I’m not one for weddings. As “hot” as Molly is in a current pop culture sort of way, I never really cared much about her. She was more generous than S.S., and far more sweet and worthy of a high-end restaurant excursion, but there was acting going on, especially in the bedroom where true feeling counts. She never climaxed and didn’t seem to care. She wanted it hard and that was about it. “I could see her just lying there,” a mutual friend once said after asking me what she was like in bed to no reply. On the surface most men would assume she’d “ride like a Cadillac on a toll road,” to quote a subject in a recent documentary I watched on swingers. But looks can be deceiving.
Molly went on to attempt to lure me down south right then at 8pm on a Friday night, when I had to work the next morning at 8 AM to crush 40 tons. We live six hours apart from each other by the way. A girl that works in the wine industry, even though she is young, should know better. But so should I, because I was even calculating the possibility of doing the night run. The text train ended with: “Oh well, maybe it wasn’t meant to work out. Perhaps we’ll talk after your harvest if you return. If not no worries… but again, good luck with your harvest Darren!”
I talked about all this with Danny as we filled a long line of barrels with Split Rail Pinot Noir one day. I asked him if he’d ever been with a fat woman who was surprisingly a good lover, or if he’d ever traveled great distances for sex with a bombshell like Molly. This conjured up a bizarre confession about his year living in the guest room of an old, wealthy, single male Washington DC. political figure that would commonly have young attractive late teen boys living with him. The man would spoil these kids, Danny included, and had a trio of small dogs that had full house privileges.
“Did you even have to pay rent?” I asked him, after we volcano’d another in a long line of barrels. We were covered in purple wine by this point in the day, trading stories, cracking up and forgetting the fact that we were filling barrels with a highpowered pump.
“At first.”
“Oh man, what did he do to you?”
“He’d massage me.”
“Massage you?”
“He gave great massages.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“He’d spend a half hour just rubbing my ass.”
“There’s that rent then.”
Danny, like his actor father, was the perfect male specimen.
“Some nights he’d climb into bed with me, his dogs too, and read me children’s stories.”
Just then Rebecca came waltzing by with a sassy smile, teasing eyes, and flashed us her purple Victoria’s Secret bra as she made her way toward the lab. This harvest was amazing!
I announced my second bout of singlehood to Zach at lunch. “Get fucking out of here!” he said. I told him about Molly asking me to do the night run. “You would’ve gotten down there at what, two in the morning? Then turn around and head back up at four?”
“Yeah. I almost went for it. She’s pretty… hot.”
“So are you going back to Rohnert Park?” he asked with a quivering smirk.
“A text was sent there immediately!” I joked. He cracked up at that, as if rekindling the futile fire with S.S. down in Sonoma was the natural move for a man in my position. But instead, texts have begun to fly the past couple nights with a woman named Julie Dickinson, also of San Luis Obispo. She is a 38-year old single mother and folk hipster, with beautiful blue eyes and what my friend Sundaran would call a “rigging” body. She sent a provocative picture text last night that read:
“How’s this: I’ll send you a sexy self-portrait every few days so you won’t have to go the gay route.”
With all this in mind, I’ve been really feeling Bob Dylan lately, particularly Blood on the Tracks and more specifically “You’re a Big Girl Now.” The verse “I know where I can find you, oh-oh, in somebody’s room” reminds me of SS, or Molly, or my ex-wife, or all girls for that matter.
I put a line of it up on Facebook and Molly immediately sent me a text that read “Heavy FB update!” This lead in to an exchange with her wherein she accused me of hooking up with “that girl that lives on the coast.”
Hooking up with my friend Autumn in Fort Bragg?! That came out of nowhere. I didn’t think of Molly as the suspicious type, but there it is. Sure Autumn had been posting a couple things on my Facebook wall about crashing at her and her boyfriend’s place in Fort Bragg that one night, but nothing provocative. I concluded this nonsense with “You’re a tricky, beautiful individual Molly.”
A heavy stream of pictures from Julie was texted my way, with magazine worthy angles and clarity. They looked like 1970’s glamour porn. I wondered how she was so good at self-portraiture. I assumed a tripod was being used, since both hands were always free and occupied in every shot. I finally asked her and found out her ex-boyfriend had taken most of these months ago. “That guy is/was your soul mate,” I wrote her. She’d told me about him on a lusty night back in August. The kinky photos, the biting, slapping, and the rough, choking sex.
Too bad he knocked someone else up and had to end it, because I’m definitely no match for this gal. Yet up here on the mountain in a trailer with my favorite sweatpants on and Molly and SS out of the picture, I can’t say I’m not intrigued.
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