I have a wicked wanderlust. This is one of the reasons I ride a motorcycle: because on any given Saturday I’m willing to take off and hit a small town in South Dakota — as long as it’s one I’ve never seen before. I’ll also seize whatever random opportunity comes my way to get on a plane and BE somewhere else for a while. This week, I went out to New York City in order to give a 20-minutes speech at the New York Academy of Medicine. At least, that was the plan.
On the panel were one of the world’s top research psychiatrists, a doc from Johns Hopkins, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and, uh. . . .me. No pressure there.
I was last on the agenda, going immediately after the woman from Hopkins who’d single-handedly set up a peds unit for critically ill children while raising two kids of her own and no doubt darning her husband’s silk socks. But after hours worth of PowerPoint presentations, each of which had multiple technical difficulties, the moderator looked at me and said in a genuinely gloomy tone, “I’m so sorry, our program has gone over time, you’ll have to keep your comments to five minutes. Seven at most.”
There was wine at my left hand: a glass of Beaulieu Vineyards Chardonnay, which is the Skippy peanut butter of white wines. It’s cheap and if not high-brow, perfectly fine — even marginally satisfying — once you get a few swallows in. Well, ordinarily, I don’t drink before speaking (which is why the full glass was sitting there, untouched). But in this case, I made an exception and downed about a third in what I hope was a ladylike motion, rose and said, “Well, I’m a writer, I’m used to being edited,” then gave my 20-minute talk in 6 minutes flat.
It was a lovely trip, really. The Academy people couldn’t have been nicer. No, that’s not true. They could have been the guy with dreads and a grease-stained jacket at Grand Central who swiped his very own Metro card for me and whispered, “Go,” when I was ineptly trying to rush the turnstile and catch the Lexington Avenue train.
I had lunch with my agent at the Blue Water Grill, a terrific, casual publishing hang-out on Union Square. (And yes, for those of you — thank you — who are reading closely: the agent responded, the book is being tweaked and readied for editors’ eyes. My neurosis about it grinds endlessly on.) We ate some great spicy tuna rolls and assorted other sushi, but we didn’t have wine over lunch, which is a shame, really, because it probably would have been the only decent glass of my week.
As it was, things went downhill from the Skippy-level Chardonnay.
I went to the airport yesterday afternoon, dashed in feeling late, in fact, for what was to have been a 6:30 flight. After I stood in line and got my e-ticket, however, I noticed the time had been changed to 6 o’clock. “How odd,” I thought. “They rarely move the flight times back.” That, of course, is when I realized that not only had the time been changed, the date had as well. This morning, six a.m., and I had no place to spend the night.
The woman behind the American Airlines counter was on the phone, speaking Italian. She hung up, turned to the couple at my side, and had a rapid conversation in Spanish. By the time she turned to me, I’d put her right up next to the doctor with the seven or eight Ivy League M.D.’s. (People who speak multiple languages always intimidate me in a biblical, highly evolved sort of way.) I showed her my ticket and she punched something into her computer. “Northwest at 10:45,” she said in a gruffly lilting Puerto Rican accent. “The weather is bad. They might let you on, might not.”
Which is how I ended up, elbow-to-elbow with a furniture salesman from Detroit, at the bar in the Delta terminal at La Guardia, asking for a wine list. To which the bartender scoffed. “We got red,” he said, holding up a crusty bottle of Kendall-Jackson Merlot. This is one of those wines I’ll drink at a pub, if I absolutely must. If it’s that or, say, Schlitz. So I said, “Sure,” and he tipped the bottle, but what came out was more the consistency of slurry than wine. The only taste I took was thick and scorched, like the stuff that dribs onto the bottom of the oven when you bake a blueberry pie. I switched to soda water, which the furniture salesman insisted on putting on his tab, and waited among thousands of hot, stranded bodies for my plane to land.
They let me on the plane. I nearly wept. My husband picked me up from the nearly deserted nighttime airport on the other side. We came home and despite the late hour, opened a bottle of wine. It was corked. So we opened another — the only one we had. It happened to be an odd vintage with a demented Robert Crumb-ish label called Plungerhead Old Vine Zinfandel 2005, which someone had given me insisting it was good. It’s made by The Other Guys, a whimsical little division of the mega-corporate Don Sebastiani & Sons.
This wine is called Plungerhead, apparently, because it’s sealed with a “zork” — a rubbery little mushroom top cap that’s been wrapped with a spiral of plastic you have to unzip. It’s supposed to keep the wine good. Well guess what? It isn’t good to begin with. At least this bottle — at 1:30 a.m. on a Friday morning, after a total of 12 hours spent sitting on airplanes and in airports over the space of only 24 — didn’t seem so to me. It has a nose of cranberry and cough syrup, and a flavor to match, only the taste fades quickly in a sour way. And I expect more from a basic $12-14 bottle of Zin.
The only good part: Plungerhead has a whopping 14.8% alcohol, which made it better than Nyquil for knocking me out.
I can’t say I’m sorry for the way of the week. Typically, my days are full of sameness and routine, interrupted from time to time with a really fine glass of wine. This was a whirlwind of activity, new experience, and truly putrid drinking. Life is meant to be lived, after all, and an adventurer is bound to run into a few snags (seen Into the Wild, anyone?). As trade-offs go, this one — compared to killing a moose, eating poison and dying a lonely death — wasn’t so bad. But I’m looking forward to something far better when I tilt my glass tonight.
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