Lou has always had this uncanny ability to meet the right people at the right time.
All he has to do is ask one person that he knows if they know anyone that could help him, and suddenly, he has five potential connections to whatever he needs. So once I finished writing a passable business plan outlining Lou’s ideas for his wine club, Lou started networking to find the right kind of investors and partners for the business. It seemed like things were tracking better than we expected, and Lou was finding favorable responses to his ideas whenever he had the opportunity to pitch his concepts.
But. The wine industry is beyond tricky.
There is so much to know, and so many ways you can blow it. And people who are already working in the industry are quick to tell you all of the ways you can’t do things; however, they’ll also tell you how much they long for things to change.
New ideas for selling wine seem to be welcome, but it doesn’t take long to see that an entrepreneurial spirit can easily drown in the bottom of the barrel. So if you’re going to do something, you just have to jump in with both feet and be prepared to pivot. A lot… And that’s Lou’s specialty. He keeps moving in all directions with his ideas, and he never stops trying.
So to keep our momentum, in mid-July, Lou and I drove down to LA to spend a few days with one of the guys Lou met at Tony’s industry party. It didn’t really feel like this guy was going to be a part of what Lou was building, but at that time, Lou followed every lead. He had to. Every conversation he had with someone in the business taught him a bit more about the wine and spirits industry, and every opportunity to connect with others exposed us to all kinds of useful experiences. Plus, whenever we were in any kind of motion, it kept our hopes alive.
But if I’m being totally honest, the idea of going to LA inspired a bit of a selfish hope in my heart, too.
I thought when I told Roy that I would be in town on unrelated business it might trigger him to follow up with Ira about the pilot. I hadn’t connected with Roy much after we moved up to Monterey — it just seemed like I needed to be still and wait for him to reach out to me. But, if I was going to be in LA, it just seemed reasonable for me to reach out to him to see how things were going. So. I sent Roy a text message on my second day in town.
A few hours after I sent my text, Roy called me, and as soon as I heard his voice, I could tell he was deflated. Of course Roy was his usual kind self, but his tone sounded down, and he fumbled his words a bit — which was unusual for him in my experience. But because Roy is the person he is, he still tried to encourage me despite the fact that he said he had some bad news to tell me. I remember trying to brace myself for the news — especially because I was certain Roy was going to tell me that Ira didn’t like the pilot. But instead, Roy said something I totally didn’t expect.
He said that things in Lana and Ira’s personal lives had gone terribly wrong…
First off, one-week prior, one of Lana’s family members was murdered in a police-involved shooting in the San Francisco Bay Area. Because I was living just outside of that part of California, I had actually read something in the news about the shooting right after it happened, but I had no idea the shooting was connected to someone I (sort of) knew!
Lana was understandably shaken, and so she decided to step away from Ira’s agency for a few months so she could support her family in San Francisco. She couldn’t stay in LA while her family was embroiled in such a mess, and so no one could blame her for taking time off. And while this was horribly sad news, Roy wasn’t finished. The next bomb he dropped on me was even bigger than the first.
Roy told me that Ira had just been diagnosed with leukemia.
Roy went on to express to me how the news of both of these events nearly leveled him. He said that it felt like the whole world had suddenly stopped spinning. These people were more than business associates to Roy. These were his close friends, and, Ira, in particular, was Roy’s professional mentor. Ira’s family was still in shock, and even though Ira was pursuing all of his medical options — including a bone marrow transplant — his family was insisting that he at least step away from his agency until after Labor Day. Roy said everyone was trying to stay optimistic and upbeat, but considering Ira’s age, and the kind of cancer he had, the outlook was rather bleak.
I don’t know why I remember this, but I know I was sitting in a red armchair with cigarette burns in the seat cushion when Roy gave me all of this news. The ugly singed holes seemed so unfortunate and selfish. But as the news started to sink in, I remember feeling incredibly stunned.
So many terrible things were happening to these two people who held all of my hopes in their hands. It was like the fabric connecting me to Lana, Ira, and Roy had somehow been damaged, and things could never be set right again. That thought gutted me. Ira and Lana had so many more important things to think about now… And, they were clearly too busy to be bothered with Eloise.
I was still nobody in the mix of things in this world I wanted to be in, and that reality made my heart break.
But as soon as I let myself falter like that, I instantly felt selfish for being disappointed about how all of this news impacted me. And that’s when I realized that my heart was also breaking for these two people I thought about all the time, but hardly knew. I didn’t even have enough of a personal connection to either of them to offer a word of comfort or a gesture of kindness, but I could honestly feel the pain of their loss and confusion. What was happening to Lana and Ira was so much more important in the grand scheme of things than an original series could ever be…
