You Really Can Have It All
(LEFT: me w/ Chateau Latour on a Sunday night; RIGHT: Arthur licking pet-nat off his paw)
I had a dream I lost my cat. In the dream, my cat was named “Kirby.” I roamed the aisles of a French pet supply store screaming his name, but I knew it would be fruitless.
It was possible that he’d been eaten by a large, long-haired male cat. The cat walked on his hind legs like a human, and was notorious for eating his own kittens, like a bear. In the dream, I saw him. He gobbled up one tiny kitten, then another. I wailed and wailed. Had he eaten Kirby? I walked down another aisle, where I saw more kittens standing in a row. All of them were creepy, and none of them were mine. One was blue and had gold top-stitching around the parameter of his face, like a shoe. I understood that my cat was gone forever. I wailed and wailed and wailed.
I woke up. In real life, my cat was named Arthur, and he was curled up right next to me. My red-and-white checkered curtain turned the light in the room murky scarlet and my bedsheets were burgundy flannel to a womblike effect. I felt great relief. I hugged Arthur and told him I lost him in a dream, but in real life I’d always keep him safe.
Arthur was in a mushy, sleepy mood, and I took pictures of his sleeping face— his closed eyes, two parentheses, are positioned slightly higher on his face than expected, and the asymmetry is dazzling, like a supermodel with a teeth gap. I earnestly Instagrammed some choice shots accompanied by grateful, loving words in celebration of my four-week anniversary of adopting him.
(I had an ex-boyfriend who I once watched cradle his cat in his arms like a baby. He stage-whispered to her, making obvious sure I heard: You saved my life. I found him soapy and performative, and after our break-up would cite this event as flagrant proof of his lameness. But now—irritatingly— I get it.)
The moment passed. Arthur did his thing, and I did mine. I was playing the New York Times Spelling Bee game on my phone when I heard a sudden noise from the kitchen: Arthur had knocked over a bottle of Los Chuchaquis ‘Champelli’ pet-nat. The bottle didn’t break, but the crown cap was disturbed and it exploded and hissed. Arthur, damp with sparkling Albariño and justifiably terrified, ran into my room and hid under the bed. I found the whole thing comical— He was just trying to celebrate our anniversary!— until I started stressing out about the possibility of him getting drunk from licking it off himself and subsequently dying of alcohol poisoning. I called the vet and the vet was chill about it so if he died the onus lay on the vet. I wiped the pet-nat off his fur with a damp cloth and watched him groom himself. He did such a good job of grooming himself. When he finished, he was a new kind of fluffy, so impressively clean.
I went to work at the fancy restaurant. I ate grocery store sushi in the wine cellar, my feet in oxblood penny loafers propped up on a shelf, the tops of my thighs a plate. I watched Arthur sleeping peacefully on the cat cam, zooming in on his tummy to make sure he was breathing. I was still worried he might die.
At the host stand they keep small pins of the restaurant’s logo that all the somms and managers pin to their lapels. At first I thought they didn’t give me a pin because they weren’t sure if they were going to keep me around or not. When I found out the pins were available to everyone, I decided I was too punk rock to wear one. But as it turns out, I like working at the fancy restaurant. In celebration of owning a cat for four weeks and liking working at the fancy restaurant, I went to the host stand and asked the host for a pin. She gave me three of them like they were worth nothing. They came in small plastic baggies, like drugs.
I was stationed in the room called the Atrium. A server called me over to a table, and an older man in a suit pointed to a wine on the list and asked me about it. It was a 2015 Grand Vin de Chateau Latour, which I had never tasted or dreamed of tasting in my life. I shared some broad tasting notes that I know enough to know couldn’t be untrue. I ended my spiel with, “Anyone in the world would be lucky to taste this wine.” I often sell wine I haven’t tasted, but I never lie.
The man agreed to buy the bottle on the grounds that I too pour myself a glass. Touched, I made a soapy, performative joke in response. I am never quick-witted working service. I only think of slick comebacks hours later.
I knew the wine was fancy, but hadn’t yet clocked the price. When I punched it in, I felt a chill run through me: it was the most expensive wine I’d ever sold by thousands. The bottle cost more than I have ever had in my chequing account in my life. I returned to the table to double-check that I wasn’t going to fuck up my entire life and open the wrong bottle by idiotic accident. I wasn’t. It was true. I really did sell that wine.
I was shaking as I walked to the cellar and I was shaking as I took the bottle from the shelf and I was shaking as I walked it across the dining room and presented the bottle and opened it and poured the taste and decanted it and poured it out. It was shining liquid black in the glass, purple-black, Chanel Vamp. The server wrote BE CAREFUL, VERY EXPENSIVE WINE in ballpoint pen on a piece of receipt roll and placed it next to the decanter at the service station.
The guest urged me to pour myself my glass. I poured a ballsy three ounces into an AP and walked decisively to the cellar, heels clicking. I quickly Googled “Bordeaux vintages” on my phone and found that 2015 had been “balmy, exceptionally good, but not legendary.” When I returned to the table and gave my feedback to the guest, I would be sure to reference the vintage as though this were information I’d already known. I have always wanted to be the type of somm who knows my Bordeaux vintages. Literally all it would take would be twenty minutes of Googling and some weak memorization, but instead I spend my mornings playing the New York Times Spelling Bee game, hoping I will find enough words for it to pronounce me a Genius.
I stood alone in the cellar with my glass of 2015 Grand Vin de Chateau Latour Premier Grand Cru de Pauillac. I didn’t want it to be good; I didn’t want it to be bad. I wanted it to be whatever it was, and to assess it fairly and honestly as myself. Crazy-fancy famous expensive brand name wines can be overrated, and I was hyper-conscious of this truth as I sniffed and tasted. For the most part if somebody put a gun to my head and asked me if I wanted something to be good or to be bad I would say that I want everything to be good, and that I’m heartbroken when it isn’t. But in the case of crazy-fancy famous expensive brand name wine, I might on account of my punk rock nature hope the whole thing’s a ruse.
It wasn’t. The wine was perfect, it was actually perfect, perfect in this way that made the sound disappear, all of it, a transcendent hum. It was like when people who had near-death experiences tell their stories of what they saw when they died for a minute. It wasn’t my “thing,” so to speak, like it was still a kind of boring trad Bordeaux, but like Hey Jude or an even-numbered Beethoven symphony, great art transcends preference. It drank like the seven fastest runners in the world running at the same speed in stunning synchronicity: one representing acid, one structure, one body, one leather, one cocoa, one earth, one fruit. Each note fanned out in velvet symbiosis, oozed, concluded, cooed. The fruit—barefaced cassis, brilliant plum— was the singer, and the finish was confidently short. It made me think of the end of Shakey Dog by Ghostface Killah or Speedboat by Renata Adler. Cut it off, don’t drag it out.
When I got home, my cat was still mad at me. He was rattled by the events of that morning, which had become in his mind my fault. I poured myself a glass of the foamy-yet-ephemeral pet-nat he’d essentially wasted, and drank it in bed while playing fetch with him. He was being a bitch about playing fetch, pretending he didn’t know how it ended. I threw the ball, and he looked at me like I threw it wrong. I didn’t, though. I threw it right.
He came up to me and sniffed the wine in my glass. It made his hair stand on end, the same disgusting wine that had ruined his life that morning. Me though I loved it, it smelled like sweet tomato garden and Dole Whip, passionfruit ice. The bubbles were already fading but the bubbles weren’t the point. There was junk in the bottom of the glass, but the junk in the bottom of the glass meant it was alive. It was sassy and cold and it was fresh like when a Southern mother says “Don’t be fresh” after you take the Lord’s name in vain.
I feel like no matter which way I turn some natural wine person is telling me why I shouldn’t like trad Bordeaux or some classical wine person is telling me why I shouldn’t like goofy pet-nat. I align myself way more closely with the natural wine faction of my community because natural wine is lively-and-alive and less for rich people and so obviously more punk rock. But some rich people use their gifts for good and not evil and pour me a glass of 2015 Grand Vin de Chateau Latour Premier Grand Cru Classé on a Sunday night. Recently somebody told me he thinks of himself as a wine geek, not a wine snob, because geeks are about inclusivity, and I thought that was really great. I said, “I’ll probably steal that,” but I won’t. On account of my punk rock nature, I’d never call myself a geek.
Feel the power of the dark side. 😉
the seven synchronous runners representing facets of the wine is such a beautiful simile