My Neighbor, the Hedonist

Tom, my next door neighbor, has given up totally on physical health and prefers instead to bask in the glow of cigar smoke and very, very good wine. He has three bottles of Velvet Glove in his fridge and I am determined to share one with him, perhaps over the best f*cking ribeyes you’ve ever had. Tom is the operations manager for El Charro. He works six days a week, doesn’t keep up with his landscaping, and travels to California to taste wine with the likes of Doug Shafer who Tom says used to live in Tucson and who seems to know Tom and vice versa, allowing Tom to visit one of the finest wineries in Napa and try out past vintages of Hillside Select Cabernet. Needless to say, I’m very happy to know Tom, if only tangentially, over the cinder block wall of our shared back yards. I recently had the opportunity to trade him a bottle of Boarding Pass for a bottle of Molly Dooker, again through the chink in our shared wall, while sipping some Blue Moon Zinfandel from one of Tom’s Riedel glasses that he purchased at cost (the wine and the glass). He told me to set the glass on the wall when I was finished. That’s just the kind of guy Tom is: generous, and fatalistic. I love him. We have nothing in common but a shared interest in really awesome red wine, which apparently is more than enough.

I love my neighborhood.