The M(S)etamorphosis

One morning, when Gregor Sommsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his tuxedoed back, and if he lifted his head a little, he could see a silver tastevin glistening in the morning sun. There was a strange pin placed ominously in his lapel, and he was certain that he could name all the rivers that course through every major wine-growing region. The bedding was barely able to cover him, and his arms, weak and thin as commercial Pinot Grigio, waved helplessly around him, each hand holding a Zalto.

“What’s happened to me?” he thought. He wasn’t dreaming. His room appeared normal, if small, and the table in the corner was covered with wine samples—Gregor was a wine sales rep—and above it there hung a picture that he’d recently cut from an illustrated lifestyle magazine that had nothing to do with wine, “Wine Spectator.” The picture showed an older balding white man, the author of a regular column in the lifestyle magazine, so it could have been any one of a dozen who fit that description.

Gregor thought he should just go back to sleep, and when he awoke, his nightmare would be over. But he liked to sleep on his stomach and the tastevin bore into his solar plexus. “I hate the world,” he thought. “My sales rep job is terrible. I spend all day sucking up to young sommeliers who lecture me on why my wines are terrible, or I have to beg them to taste a wine that got 98 points because it’s Napa Cabernet and they only want wines from Mt. Etna. They seem to think people go out to dinner because they love being around sommeliers, and being made to look ignorant. That’s not why you go out to dinner, that’s why you read Matt Kramer.”

At that moment, Gregor’s mother entered the room. Like most wine sales reps, Gregor still lived at home and was single. Gregor looked up at his mother and tried to say “Good Morning” to her, but when he spoke all he said was, “Pyrazines.” His mother looked at him with horror, unable to grasp the nightmarish image of what Gregor had become, that horrible vermin that infests fine restaurants other than roaches. She clapped her hand over her mouth and fled his bedroom, slamming the door behind her and calling for Gregor’s sister Grete.

Gregor slowly eased himself out of his bed. He could hear his family arguing about him in the other room, his mother expressing her disgust and fear at what he had become. “That’s not a real job,” she was saying to his father, “that’s just an excuse for a job. What will we tell our friends?! That our Gregor is a Master Sah…” “Don’t say it!” his father cried. “I’ll squash him like an insect if that’s what he’s become.” Gregor walked over to his table and began to put his wine samples into his rolling carrying case, as if he were going to go to work like any other day, as if nothing had changed. Then he noticed that all of his samples had changed, too. Instead of his interesting portfolio of small producers from all over the world, the wines were all from Constellation! “My God,” he thought, “I must really be that horrible vermin if this is what I have to peddle for the rest of my life!” He called out to his family, to his loving sister Grete.

“What are those horrible noises he’s making?” his mother said. “It sounded like, ‘Donkey and Goat Radikon Abbatucci Joly’” his sister said. “It’s gibberish! He must have had a stroke!” Grete rushed in to help her brother, whom she loved very much, only to find a very different man, one that made her skin crawl and her grip tighten on her purse. Gregor had gained thirty pounds, his teeth, once whiter than a WSET graduate, were stained purple, and he was looking at her lasciviously. “Creep,” she thought. And then she ran, slamming the door behind her as her mother had done. Gregor was a wine sales rep, having doors slammed in his face seemed like just another day.

When his father entered the room Gregor could see the anger and odium in his eyes. His father was carrying a copy of “Somm Journal,” and was waving it at Gregor. Gregor cowered at the publication, and felt his own unexpected wave of revulsion. He didn’t want that magazine to touch him, though he didn’t know why. His father was swatting at him with the magazine, and stomping his feet, frightening Gregor into cowering in his closet. Gregor was pleading with his father to stop, but his father showed no sign of understanding a single word out of his mouth. Content with forcing his son into the darkness, his father turned to leave the room. Gregor tried to follow, his tastevin pounding against his heart. His father turned and removed a Screwpull from his pocket, throwing it with all his might at him. It lodged in Gregor’s back as he turned to try and avoid it. Gregor screamed in pain, an unearthly sound that reminded his father of something horrible, like the beginning of another Levi Dalton podcast. Gregor didn’t know what to do, how to remove the tool. Vermin like he’d become had never known any sort of Screwpulls. He rolled around on the floor of his bedroom in agony, his father kicking at him, forcing him to crawl on his hands and knees like a maȋtre d’ looking for a quarter, a trail of blood from the Screwpull wound like inexcusable drops of Tannat on the carpet. Gregor whimpered, and his father told him, “Go ahead, Gregor, you’re one of them now, whine away. You’ll need it to get out those carpet stains.”

His father kicked the door shut with his foot, Gregor lay on the floor in his expensive tuxedo, and, then, finally, all was quiet.