Dead in the Dregs Read Free Page B

silences between us were excruciating.
    By the time Danny was in day care, the marriage was a lost cause. I was asleep when Janie got our son out the door and was gone by the time she picked him up. On Sundays—the only day we had as a family—I was too exhausted to notice.
    One morning Janie announced out of the blue that she’d been
having an affair with a guy at work. In fact, it had been going on for months. What could I say? Whatever physical intimacy we’d known had long since evaporated. She moved out a month later. She’d been offered a job back in the Bay Area, a real promotion as head of her own research division, with serious money. And, of course, she took Daniel with her.
    What seemed at first to be a trial separation turned out to be a divorce, and I followed them to California. I wanted to purge myself, to pare down, to do penance. I needed to be closer to my son, to prove something to myself and to Janie. I just wasn’t sure what it was or when I’d get the chance.
    I hitchhiked down the coast as far as Eureka and found a faded pink Ford pickup that I bought for $600 and christened Bandol because its color was a ringer for a fine rosé. On the Pacific coast north of Mendocino, I spotted a ’57 Airstream marooned on the side of Highway 1 with a FOR SALE sign taped in its rear window, its aluminum skin pockmarked by the salt air, and hauled it across the Coast Range to the wine country in search of my Garden of Eden, as Woody Guthrie had sung.
    An old friend from Berkeley found me moorage on a lot behind a ranch house on the eastern slope of Howell Mountain. I hooked up electrical and tied into the septic tank. I loved the trailer. It was like a space capsule hurtling through the void of my life, a monk’s cell on the wind-blasted slopes of Mount Athos. My hermitage, I called it.
    Life stripped down to its bare essentials: one burner, a sink, the toilet; turquoise appliances that had peeled over time; twin beds, a table, a bookshelf; a lantern on gimbals and a ship’s clock. I was hiding out, letting the torrent of events break against the shore and wash over me. I adopted a stray tabby I named Chairman Meow, a sorry substitute for a child. It was a simple life, but I didn’t mind. You need a good dog paddle in the back eddies every once in a while.
    I needed to earn a living but wanted to avoid the trendy bars and restaurants. Miraculously, I landed at the one last place in Calistoga that possessed a modicum of grit. It was a real bar with a community of regulars who’d been beating a path there for years to escape the tourists and tasters and collectors, the second-career winery owners and real estate developers who’d descended on Napa and
spoiled it since I first knew it as a Berkeley undergrad. Then Pancho, who hired me, took off one night, proclaiming that he’d had it with gringos and was returning home to spend the rest of his life with his wife and kids, his brothers and sisters, his ailing grandmother. He tossed me the keys, bellowed ¡Mucha suerte! and disappeared into the night. A week later, when DEA agents in emblazoned vests turned up, their weapons drawn, I learned that Pancho had been dealing keys of grass across the bar and somehow managing to stay one step ahead of the law.
    Suddenly I was the patrón of my own place.
    At that point the green baize of the pool table was nearly as threadbare as my bank account. The SIERRA NEVADA PALE ALE sign, emblematic of my life, flickered as if lit by its own personal lightning storm. The solid oak bar was pitted and the linoleum torn and jagged, revealing patches of bare concrete. Like me, the place was beat to shit, and so I felt at home. Little did I realize that it would suck me in just as surely as had my previous career. If anything, I now had even less time for my kid. Though the court had granted me regular visitation, there’s nothing regular when you own a bar. Weeks and months went by without a visit. I wasn’t sure if or how I’d