Send Down the Rain(61)

Eight months into my trip to nowhere, I found myself in Seattle in the rain. I had not shaved or cut my hair since I left. Despite my news avoidance, I picked up on the fact that my charade had made Suzy famous. Both her radio and TV spots sat in their respective number one spots across all time zones and markets. Her discovery had launched her into the stratosphere, and I had been labeled the greatest soldier of fraud in the history of modern media.

A month later I found myself in northern California. Sonoma. Sitting in an outdoor coffee shop, watching the city square, when a giddy couple, just kids in their late twenties, sat down and started talking about their winery. Every morning they showed up. A week passed. The picture of the two of them was tender. I came back each day just to watch them hold hands and listen to their laughter. Their love for each other oozed out of their pores like garlic. Not gooey like two people who need to get a room, but simple and pure affection. Tender love. Two kids enjoying the adventure of this life and wanting to live it with each other. They were young enough to be my kids, and maybe that was part of their appeal too.

One day the guy turned to me and said, “Pardon the intrusion, but I’m just curious. You’ve been here all week. You always order two cups of coffee, then drink one and pour out the other. There’s got to be a story there. And what’s with the lit cigarette you don’t smoke?”

We started talking.

I learned that they had some big problems. Not with each other, but with the life they lived. From what I could piece together, Tim and Becca had partnered with a majority investor, and while these kids knew wine, the investor had the money and called all the shots. The Becca Winery was teetering on the verge of losing it all.

Sitting at the café, I applied for a job.

Tim looked at me and said, “How old are you?”

I had to think about it. “Almost sixty-three.”

Becca looked uncertain. “Can you handle it?” She palmed her sweaty forehead. “It’s difficult work.”

“If I can’t, you can fire me and don’t have to pay me a penny.”

Over the weeks, they taught me to tend the vines. They knew more about wine, how to make it, and what makes it really good, than I’d ever know. They had lived a decade in Italy, France, and Spain and poured their life’s savings and everything they could borrow into this venture. I also learned about their partner. The money guy. And how his profit-making decisions were often at odds with their award-winning, wine-making intentions. Tim educated me on cabernets and chardonnays and tried to help me understand what my palette was trying to tell me. He was a good kid, but I sensed a growing heaviness in him I couldn’t place.

Oddly enough, they didn’t own a TV, so they spent their evenings wrapped around each other like two vines, listening to a transistor radio on the porch. What would they listen to? Suzy True. They never missed a show.

The only window into the outside world that I had came through Suzy. I still didn’t watch the news. Didn’t read the papers. Didn’t own a phone or a TV. But one thing became painfully obvious. My interaction with Suzy had shattered something inside her. Whatever she believed about me, and the pain my betrayal had caused, had cracked open the only remaining reservoir of hope she had. Her tone of voice changed. Where she once was intimate and would crawl through the airwaves, she now seemed distant and indifferent. Callers praised her for her extreme weight loss and asked her how she did it. She danced around them, talking about “deciding she needed to do something,” but the truth was, I had broken her heart and she’d lost the taste for food.

Harvest came, and it was a good one. Tim and Becca made me a manager, and for the next several months I tried to help them climb out of the hole their partner had dug. But one day I came into the barn and found Becca crying. Tim holding her. They had come to say good-bye. They were going to lose everything.

I started asking questions. Didn’t take me long to learn that when they’d signed their agreement with their partner, they had inserted a buy-back option. Meaning if things went badly and the assets had to be sold, either party could end the partnership for a predetermined sum. I don’t know how they arrived at the sum, but it was pennies on the dollar compared to what had been invested, and if I didn’t know any better I’d say the partner had scripted the agreement this way so that he could own his own winery for a fraction of what it would cost otherwise. He knew they had poured everything in, and he knew he controlled both the purse strings and the decisions.

As I listened to them relate the decisions he’d made, all I could think was nobody with any business sense whatsoever would do what he’d done. My conclusion: he had purposefully sunk the winery. Or devalued it to the point that it was almost worthless. He had also crafted the agreement in such a way that he had veto power over any other partners they wanted to bring in, so even if they found the money he could deny them. Very clever. Becca and Tim didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and no bank in their right mind would lend them money, and their partner knew this.

They had dreamed of a winery. Of building something together. Their partner had never dreamed at all. The more I heard, the angrier I grew.

The sun was going down, and Tim opened one final cabernet. A long silence passed as they stared out across the vines they had pampered, sung to, and nurtured. Everything they loved had come crashing down.

I swirled my wine, watching the dregs drain down the inside of the glass. “Just curious, how much do you owe? What’s the buy-out clause?”