Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (10 page)

14

washington, lee & wolfe

Since 1985, Washington and Lee University, a private liberal arts college in Lexington, Virginia, has been coeducational, but when I studied there in the 1950s, the only breasts on campus belonged to the law school’s hot librarian (thanks to whom that library was filled to capacity every evening) and a couple of carbo-enhanced mammoths who played offensive line for the football team. W&L had been exclusively male since its founding in 1749, and its male students have themselves been rather exclusive since the academically rigorous school was and remains highly selective: only 15 percent of applicants were admitted for the year 2012–2013.

Some considered W&L, known as “the Princeton of the South,” a sort of finishing school for Southern gentlemen, a notion reinforced by the college’s famous honor system, still in effect, and its strict insistence on conventional dress, a rule only recently modified in deference to the widespread contemporary predilection for informality. “Conventional dress” meant that we students were required to wear coat and tie at all times, on campus and off, except when participating in sports -- which may account for the fact that I spent such an inordinate amount of my time playing basketball.

Since the majority of W&L students were from affluent families, many of those suits and coats were well made and handsome. One student, however, stood out among all others in terms of sartorial splendor. It wasn’t that his threads were more expensive, more finely tailored than those of fellow classmen, but that they were chosen -- and worn -- with such panache, such dash. This dandy, who on warm days appeared in dazzling white suits with flowery pocket squares, was, among other things (he epitomized the “big man on campus”), sports editor of the semiweekly school newspaper, for which I, a freshman, was a cub sports reporter.

The paper was called the
Ring-tum Phi
(why, I never learned: W&L men were inclined that way), although it was referred to informally as “the Ring Dang Doo,” a slang term for “penis” (they were inclined that way as well); and the sports editor, my boss, was T. K. Wolfe III. In less than two decades, he would be known to the English-speaking world as Tom Wolfe, one of the most innovative journalists in the history of the craft, a flamboyant but sharp-eyed stylist who, along with Hunter S. Thompson, blasted open the long-standing wall between reporter and subject, creating on the page an intimacy and immediacy that put culture and counterculture in bold relief, filling semi-anthropological magazine articles with the rococo popcorn of amplified observation.

Tom Wolfe has also enjoyed a measure of success as a novelist, although his fiction suffers from the very characteristics that made his sixties and seventies journalism so vital: his flawless ear for jargon and meticulous eye for detail. His approach to fiction, he has admitted, is that of the nineteenth-century novelists, which implies a verbatim translation of life, but as W. Somerset Maugham once put it, “Realism too often produces novels that are drab and dull,” going on to assert that the fiction that really matters is make-believe, dealing not in truths per se but in effects. Wolfe either doesn’t possess or chooses not to indulge the most precious and effective potion in a novelist’s pharmacopeia: imagination. Again, I digress.

I recollect seeing Wolfe at the offices of the
Ring-tum Phi,
sitting with his smart white shoes propped up on a desk, a flop of fine barley-colored hair drooping over his right eye, reading half aloud a long epic poem he’d just composed about the foibles of the Southern Athletic Conference. He was both elegant and eloquent, and I was suitably impressed. If he spoke to me, an awkward underling, even once during that year I don’t recall it, but thirty-three years later we did share a short but, I think, agreeable exchange.

It was at the conclusion of
Esquire
magazine’s gala fiftieth anniversary dinner at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. I found myself standing behind Wolfe at the coat-check counter. It had been a splendid event (both Wolfe and I were regular contributors to
Esquire
), the room luminous with luminaries, and now we were collecting our wraps. At W&L, Wolfe had been a starting pitcher on the baseball team (I told you he was a big man on campus), and later, before he became a media star, pitched for a season in the semiprofessional Sertoma League in Richmond, his hometown. I knew this because I had to monitor local baseball during my stint on the sports rewrite desk of the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
. Before Wolfe could retrieve his cashmere topcoat, I leaned forward and asked quietly near his ear, “What exactly was your record in the Sertoma League? Was it eight-and-five or five-and-eight?”

When he whirled to face me, looking not merely surprised but incredulous, I introduced myself and tendered an explanation. Wolfe shook my hand heartily, then proceeded to tell me that whenever and wherever he spoke on college campuses, students would invariably ask if he knew Tom Robbins. Now, he said, while no less perplexed, he could at least answer that we’d met. He seemed genuinely pleased.

Any satisfaction I might have taken from this warm and ego-bolstering exchange was immediately chilled when I turned to find William F. Buckley, emperor penguin of the American right, sneering at me with the horror and revulsion he would have displayed had he come upon a bedbug lounging in his satin sheets, reserving particular odium for my ruffled pink shirt and my bow tie with colored sequins. I guess you can’t please everyone.

For all of his talent, all of his glamour, T. K. Wolfe III wasn’t the only interesting student at W&L that year. There was Glenn Allen Scott, who introduced me to the writings of Henry Miller (at the time almost impossible to find in the puritanical U.S.), and who while an undergraduate published a novel that
Newsweek
compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first book,
This Side of Paradise
.

There was Walt Michaels, a genuine gentleman athlete with whom I was conversing in the Lexington post office at the moment he tore open an envelope informing him he’d been selected to play in the National Football League. Michaels did play, and later coached for many years the New York Jets.

There was David Gale, who dropped out of school in the middle of his freshman year to go sail a sloop around the world with Captain Dod Orsborne, an intrepid adventurer whose autobiographical
Master of the “Girl Pat”
had enlivened my fantasy life as a teenager. (In my late twenties, I became romantically involved with a young married woman named Patricia whose husband, poor devil, I would unkindly refer to as “master of the girl Pat.” She never understood the reference, and anyway, shame on me.)

And speaking of Pats, super-evangelist Pat Robertson was a member of W&L’s class of 1950, but while he would go on to contribute mightily to both the commercialization of Christianity and the dumbing down of America, his talents for those black arts hadn’t announced themselves in college. At W&L, Robertson was a nonentity, though in retrospect it seems hardly possible that an ego that immense would have gone unnoticed.

Overall, I’d say that the fellow student whom I’d found most intriguing was a guy whose name long ago vanished down one of my synaptic ferret holes. All I remember of him, and what fascinated me at the time, was that he was expelled for stealing record albums from a Lexington music store -- and he didn’t own a phonograph. He seemed content to stack the albums (he was quite prolific) in a corner of his dorm room. Upon his expulsion, it was learned that he’d studied all semester for a Spanish exam -- and he didn’t take Spanish.

When my geology professor announced that at our next meeting we’d be going on a field trip, I was pleased: it would be a relief to get out of his stuffy classroom. When he advised us to wear old clothes, pleasure escalated: it would be an even greater relief to officially dispense with coat and tie. And when he told us to bring along flashlights if we possessed them, the outing seemed to promise a modicum of actual excitement, though admittedly it’s a bit of a stretch to think of excitement and geology in the same context. Thoreau advised, “Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.” An enterprise that requires old clothes (it usually means manual labor or rough recreation) should raise eyebrows, as well. In this case, I got more excitement than I’d bargained for.

The class assembled in front of Doremus Gymnasium, crossed after roll call the footbridge to the athletic field, traversed the gridiron, jumped a narrow creek (some of us more nimbly than others), made its way through a stand of light woods, and commenced to climb one of the rambling green and rocky hills that surround the Shenandoah Valley and the town of Lexington. We paused occasionally to examine fossils -- trilobites and brachiopods mostly -- embedded in rock outcroppings, amazed by concrete evidence that the entire Appalachian mountain range had at one time been under the sea. We’d tramped a couple of miles when the professor abruptly halted at a place where two rocks, each about the size of a Volkswagen Bug, abutted. (It could have been a fender bender in Düsseldorf. Or Bedrock.) Between the stone VWs, partially obscured by weeds and a scramble of broken rock, was an opening. A hole. A hole in the ground. Beaming now, the professor disclosed that this unlikely hole was the entrance to a natural cave. Activating his flashlight and instructing the rest of us to line up single file and follow, he dropped to his knees and disappeared down the shaft like some rabbitless Alice who didn’t mind muddying a pinafore.

Terrestrial cavities known as “solution caves” -- formed when subterranean limestone is dissolved by acids occurring naturally in groundwater -- are numerous in hilly western Virginia. The most celebrated, Luray Caverns, has been commercialized, its spectacular system of colored stalactites and stalagmites (some people can actually remember which is which), its columns, curtains, mirrored pools, etc. attracting fifty thousand visitors annually. Electrically lit, its gentrified entrance is surrounded by such man-made formations as a snack bar, a souvenir shop, and a parking lot. Neither outside nor inside did our field-trip cave bear noticeable resemblance to Luray.

The going was pretty easy at first. The depression sloped gradually, gently downward. It was wide enough not to feel pathologically oppressive, and entertained sufficient weak sunlight to make flashlights temporarily unnecessary. Although we couldn’t stand upright, we could hunker down and duckwalk, and oxygen seemed in generous supply. After fifteen feet or so, however, the cave became darker, more narrow, and we -- single file of course -- were forced to crawl on hands and knees. Claiming that there was a “marvelous room” ahead, the professor urged us on.

So, on we crawled, following erratically bouncing flashlight beams along a skinny passageway as damp as a sink and as dark as the inside of Groucho Marx’s dog. On and on. Until abruptly there was a chain-reaction pileup of sorts as our chthonian conga line hit a wall, an apparent dead end. Not to worry. The “room” was just on the other side, our leader told us, but to enter it, we had to follow him down a second hole.

This opening was tight. Very tight. Each of us (we were twenty in number, more or less) had to literally
squeeze
feetfirst through the portal, then slide down into the chamber which proved to be about the size (height and breadth) of a traditional kitchen; that is to say, while it was considerably smaller than the great halls of the Luray Caverns, from a spatial perspective a Thanksgiving dinner could conceivably have been prepared therein, providing, of course, that Julia Child wasn’t doing the cooking. The cave continued for more than a mile, according to our instructor, but this room was as far as our party was going, and it was here that he would deliver his lecture. Once everyone was inside.

Ah, but only about two-thirds of us were so far in the room, and it appeared that the others might not be joining us there. It likewise appeared that we might not be leaving. They were stranded outside the room, we were stranded inside it. Both parties trapped. Trapped by Howie.

As a small child, I referred to my rear end as my “bumptaratum.” The origin of the word was a mystery to Mother and Daddy, and I suspect to me, as well. Maybe it was from a language I’d spoken in a previous incarnation. Or in a parallel universe. Investigation has failed to find the word in any tongue spoken on the planet today. At any rate, Howie’s most distinguishing feature was his backside. He was a big fellow overall, though not dramatically so,
except
between his waist and his thighs, which is to say, that his gluteus was maximus. So protuberant was his posterior that it simply would not fit through the vertical opening. It, in fact, became wedged in the passage, and the more he struggled the more firmly it lodged. There he was, legs dangling at eye level on one side, my side, of the opening, his upper body flailing on the other side; students of Geology 101 trapped at both ends, and all I could think was,
I’m gonna die down in this black hole because of Howie’s bumptaratum.

(Note: Although having in my young adult years become an ardent admirer if not a literal connoisseur of the female derriere, I can assure you that I never once, neither vocally nor in my private thoughts, referred to a woman’s anatomical assets as a bumptaratum: as much as it may have amused and puzzled my mother when I was three and four, the word is silly, cartoonish, and anything but sexy. On the other hand, if any human rump of my acquaintance deserved the bumptaratum label, it was Howie’s. Nonetheless, why the epithet would reassert itself in my consciousness after so long a time and in such a precarious situation, I cannot say. Perhaps it was my brain’s attempt at gallows humor.)

In truth, we were in no clear and present danger of death. The seven or eight students above Howie could have returned to the surface and gone for help, though it would have meant crawling backward for forty or fifty yards, there being inadequate space to turn fully around; while those of us below Howie could have, as a last resort I suppose, followed the cave to the place where it terminated on a bluff above the Maury River, but as aforementioned, that terminus was a good (make that “bad”) mile away, a twisty route fraught with mazes and cul-de-sacs. Meanwhile, claustrophobia, which had been skulking around the perimeters of our party from the outset, now commenced to pull down its plastic bags over first one head and then another. There were no signs of outright panic, but I could hear guys inhaling abnormally, as if to hoard precious oxygen; and when a flashlight ray happened to sweep over a face, the expression illuminated there was one of classic unease.