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Sideways: The Ultimate Road Trip. The Last Hurrah - Softcover

Buch 1 von 4: Sideways Trilogy

Pickett, Rex

 
9780312342517: Sideways: The Ultimate Road Trip. The Last Hurrah
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0312342519 ISBN 13: 9780312342517
Verlag: Macmillan USA, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

A rollicking road novel that is the basis of award-winning director Alexander Payne's new movie of the same name. Sideways describes the journey of two men, Miles and Jack, as they leave Las Vegas en route for Jack's impending nuptials in Santa Ynez. For Jack, the weekend is his final days of freedom, for Miles the trip becomes an opportunity to evaluate his life. A raucous road trip complete with wine and beautiful women, Sideways is a thought-provoking and often humorous novel about men, friendships and human relationships. Film out now.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rex Pickett lives in Los Angeles, CA. Sideways is his first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Sideways
FRIDAY: UNCORKED
The 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 don’t like this. You are my friend. I know you are starving writer …”
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 addedThe 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 selfpublishing 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 the weekend. I’m expecting a decision toward the end of next week. Of course, he recommended some revisions.”
“Of course,” I replied. “A publishing deal would certainly have that galvanic effect on me.”
Evelyn laughed heartily, the gallows laugh of a hardworking 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 had not. I made a mental note not to give up all hope in humankind.
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 cordonedoff 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 hisinsulting 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...

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Verlag
Macmillan USA
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312342519
ISBN 13 
9780312342517
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
300
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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