Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (26 page)

On our first night in South Bend, we were kept awake beyond midnight by teenagers driving past the house, honking horns and yelling “Hippies! Hippies! Dirty hippies!” Terrie was quaking, but I calmed her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Not a problem. It’s the beginning of love.”

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before kids started dropping by two or three at a time, sheepishly curious; and ere a month passed before our living room was filled virtually every night with teenage boys digging our record collection, questioning us about current events (including the Vietnam War), sex (evasively), drugs (we never gave them any), and rock and roll (through my KRAB connections, I always had the latest albums). We might as well have been the local Boys and Girls Club. I considered requesting funding from United Way.

Terrie took a job waiting tables at a nearby seafood restaurant, from where she would fetch home leftovers off her customer’s plates. Indifferent to germs, we dined heartily and happily on slops de la mer. Is it any wonder that I’ve maintained a soft spot in my heart for waitresses? Many writers subsist on grants from foundations. Mine have been from the waitresses of American. The Daughters of the Daily Special.

As my contribution, I drove to Seattle and the
P-I
copy desk every Saturday morning, returning to South Bend late Sunday night, except during summer vacation periods or holiday weeks when I would sometimes work three or four days in a row. In the city I’d take a room at the Apex Hotel, located on a dull, pregentrified block of First Avenue. At three dollars a night, the Apex was kind of an upper-story flophouse, but operated by a Japanese couple who kept it orderly and clean. Still, it reeked of cigarette smoke, its mattresses felt like sacks of softballs, the bedsprings squeaked like thickets full of mating chipmunks, and the wallpaper would have given Oscar Wilde a heart attack.

In the Apex’s favor, aside from its rates, was the privacy it afforded. I always signed the guest register as “Picasso Triggerfish” (the English name of the neon rainbow-hued fish the Hawaiian’s call “humuhumunukunukuapua-a”), and declared my place of residence as “Victoria, BC” (I guess I was Victoria’s secret). When friends would come to the Apex looking for me, the owners would claim, “No such person here.” A war protester and outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy, I enjoyed a certain sense of security (as secure as one could feel sleeping on beds that creaked all night like Frankenstein’s shoes) to think that even the FBI probably couldn’t find me at the Apex Hotel.

In those days, the
P-I
newsroom was as divided as the nation itself. An uneasy truce existed between the old guard of Hearst hirelings and the mostly younger employees who marched to different, more progressive drummers. The latter were tolerated only because we did good work. Weekly prizes were awarded for the best headlines, prizes which Darrell Bob Houston (an unruly genius Blue Moon denizen and Tarzan lookalike) and I won so consistently that other copy editors were inclined to just stop trying. The parent Hearst Corporation frequently praised the
P-I
’s headlines, which kept the bosses content. Our work, moreover, seemed to suffer not at all when on slow nights between editions Darrell Bob, a couple of others, and I would sneak up on the roof to smoke a joint.

One night, however, a coworker brought in some blond Lebanese hashish, just off the boat, which we felt compelled to go up and sample. Back at the desk, I recall staring at the copy in front of me for an inordinately long time, as if it were the footprint of some alien life-form that I was ill equipped to identify. I don’t believe I won any prizes that night.

Which reminds me, I’m always astonished when readers suggest that I must write my novels while high on pot or (God forbid!) LSD. Apparently, there are people who confuse the powers of imagination with the effects of intoxication. Not one word of my oeuvre, not one, has been written while in an artificially altered state. Unlike many authors, I don’t even drink coffee when I write. No coffee, no cola, no cigarettes. There was a time when I smoked big Havana cigars while writing, not for the nicotine (I didn’t inhale) but as an anchor, something to hold on to, I told myself, to keep from falling over the edge of the earth. Eventually, I began to wonder what it would be like to take that fall. So one day I threw out the cigars and just let go. Falling, I must say, has been exhilarating -- though I may change my mind when I hit bottom.

Indicative of the cultural schism at the newspaper was the response to the death of Jimi Hendrix. When the report of the rocker’s untimely demise came over the Associated Press wire, our news editor snarled, “Who cares?” He wadded up the copy and tossed it in a trash can. Incredulous, I retrieved it and carried it into the managing editor’s office, explaining that Hendrix was not only an international star, he was a Seattle homeboy. The story ran in a prominent spot.

The
P-I
’s managing editor (he happened, luckily for me, to be Louis R. Guzzo, my former boss in the arts and entertainment department at the
Times
) was adept at keeping peace between the factions. I’d had an artist friend make me a mouse mask: not just any mouse, not that twit Mickey, but one of the long-nosed secret-agent mice featured in the
Mad Magazine
strip “Spy vs. Spy.” One evening I wore the mask to work. As I sat at the copy desk, doing my job, the radically stylized rodent nose protruding a good twenty inches from my face, an undercurrent of murmuring coursed through the newsroom. At one point, the managing editor passed by and, inescapably, noticed my paper proboscis. Guzzo stopped in his tracks. He just stood there staring at me, his hands on his hips. A hush fell over the room. All typing ceased. My cohorts were fearing for my job, my detractors were hoping I’d be summarily sacked. After a long pause, the boss said, “Robbins, you’ve never looked better.” He walked away. And that was that.

A month later, however, I was sent back to the Apex to change when I showed up for work in a gorilla suit.

It was at the
P-I
copy desk that I received the phone call from Luther Nichols telling me Doubleday had accepted
Another Roadside Attraction
for publication. This was around the middle of 1970. I’d finished the novel all ashiver one frigid midnight (we’d run out of heating oil) that January, and over the next six weeks or so slowly retyped the handwritten manuscript on my rackety little Olivetti portable, then paid a professional typist to render an even cleaner copy. This I’d mailed to dear Mr. Nichols, who forwarded it to New York, where, at Doubleday headquarters it was once again the subject of considerable debate. This time the younger editors prevailed.

Subsequently, a contract arrived, offering me an advance of $2,500, modest even for the time, along with a basement-level royalty percentage, standard for a first-time novelist lacking an agent to negotiate for him a sweeter deal. Not that I gave a large rat’s poot, understand. My motives for writing fiction -- which, of course, date back to early childhood -- have always been kindled by a runaway imagination and a love of words, rather than any banal craving for fortune or fame. Believe me, I take no credit for that attitude, and would never attempt to attribute it to strong moral principles. Fate just happened to have wired me that way.

A hardcover edition of
Another Roadside Attraction
was published (“printed” may be a more accurate term) in 1971. Only six thousand copies were run off and there was little in the way of promotion: no signings, book tours, interviews, or public readings. (I just felt grateful there wasn’t a public hanging.) Despite acclaim from authors as diverse as Graham Greene and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the critical establishment either dismissed the book curtly or ignored it altogether. Its first published critique appeared in
Kirkus Reviews,
in whose pages some sage declared that
ARA
wasn’t a novel at all but, rather, a lot of record album titles strung together as prose. Is it churlish of me to smirk ever so slightly when I point out that forty-three years later, the book is still in print, continuing to sell?

It was neither surprising nor particularly vexing that the hardcover edition was generally panned or ignored by reviewers:
ARA
was a radical departure in both content and form, operating outside the comfort zone of the typical critic. What
has
been unexpected is that so many members of the academic and journalistic establishment continue to this very day to hang that first novel around my neck like some literary albatross.

Since
ARA,
I’ve published eight more novels, most of them international bestsellers, and featuring such protagonists as CIA agents, stockbrokers, freelance perfumers, mythological figures, and U.S. airmen missing in Southeast Asia. Not one of these books is set in the sixties. Yet I’m regularly identified in the press as a “counterculture writer.” Now, if by “counterculture” they mean “bohemian,” that I’m ever reluctant to submit to the constraints of mainstream culture (the mainstream being too often shallow and prescribed), I accept the designation with pride. Alas, in an example of typecasting unprecedented in literary history, they seem always to be referring to the sixties, as if still so threatened, so spooked by that era and its liberties that they fear, decry, and resent it even when it isn’t there. It was an extraordinary, magical, even heroic time, that much I’ll never deny, but in my novels and in my life, for better or for worse, I moved on from the sixties decades ago. Wouldn’t one think the era’s detractors in the media could get over it as well? One can’t help but be amused.

I confess I was somewhat surprised and disappointed that not one reviewer had the courage or curiosity to ponder in print the question of what repercussions might be engendered by the proven mortality of Jesus, but my biggest disappointment in the wake of my novelistic debut lay somewhere else. In
ARA,
one of the characters steals a baboon from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Well, three weeks after the novel came out, someone
did
steal a baboon from the Woodland Park Zoo. I’m not kidding. You can look it up in the archives of the
Seattle
Times,
it was all over the news. I was totally convinced that my buddy Darrell Bob Houston had snatched the baboon in order to call attention to my book. He was entirely capable, in the name of friendship, of pulling such a caper. However, the animal was recovered unharmed after a couple of days and the thief proved to have no awareness that his life had been imitating art. Now
that
was a letdown.

The hardcover edition of
Another Roadside Attraction
didn’t exactly fly off the shelf, but the mass-market paperback enjoyed an enduring and profitable fate, though from an appropriately quirky beginning it traveled a slow and winding path. In those days, major publishing houses produced only hardcover books. Paperback rights of the more successful books would be auctioned off to paperback publishers, who’d bring them out in smaller, cheaper editions once hardcover momentum had flagged. Paperback specialists would also pick up less successful hardcover titles they felt might stand a better chance on drugstore and supermarket racks.

Ballantine Books was one such mass-market publisher. One Friday afternoon, an editor there named Leonore Fleischer filled a shopping bag with orphaned hardcovers to take home and read over the weekend on the chance that she might find something worthy of a Ballantine reprint. That night, Leonore stacked a half dozen or so books on her bedside table. Then she got into bed and smoked a joint. As she shuffled through the books at her side, looking for the most promising read, her eyes -- her now stoned eyes -- became fixed on
Another Roadside Attraction
. Well, if you’ve ever seen the bizarre hardcover jacket of
ARA
(I designed it personally), and if you’ve ever been stoned, you will understand completely why Leonore selected my book from the other more conventional candidates.

Championed by Ms. Fleischer -- to her (and perhaps to marijuana) I owe an undying debt -- Ballantine published
ARA
in 1972. It sold not steadily but in spurts, fueled strictly by word of mouth, the most flattering of all forms of advertising. Just when it would appear to be on the verge of disappearing, I’d receive a note from Leonore advising me that we were going into yet another printing.

Occasionally, I’d get a whiff of the novel’s underground reputation. One day in La Conner, where I’d moved soon after completion of the manuscript, a local painter brought by my house a couple, two old friends of his from back east, who’d just driven cross-country in a VW bus and who had a story to tell.

It seemed they had stopped for a few days at a roadside campground in New Mexico. Also camping there was a solitary man in his twenties. This stranger sat at a wooden picnic table most of the day, every day, reading a paperback book with a weird cover. The tome, they eventually noticed, was
Another Roadside Attraction
by someone named Tom Robbins. When, on their last day there, the man finished the book, he slammed it down on the table with a resounding swack. To no one in particular -- to the sky, the pine trees, the jaybirds, and squirrels -- he exclaimed, “Fuck man! The novel is NOT dead!”

With an endorsement like that, who needed
Kirkus Reviews
?

30

birds of a feather

Smelt-nibbled, duck-dotted, rain-swept, and muse-blessed, La Conner, Washington, is a collection of frontier north-to-Alaska false-fronted stores (interiorly gentrified but externally little changed since the 1890s); most of which are perched over water on pilings, the buildings looking a bit rickety and forlorn in the mist, yet echoing a certain boldness of spirit they seem to share with the gulls that attend them the way bees buzz about a hive. If La Conner sounds like a fishing village, that’s what it used to be -- before the Army Corps of Engineers (infamous for turning proud wild rivers into industrial ditches) dredged the Swinomish Slough; before it was discovered that salmon and civilization don’t mix.

Hemmed in by estuary water (a cocktail composed of equal parts fresh Skagit River and salty Puget Sound), an Indian reservation, and vast acreage of alluvial farmland so juicy rich you can almost hear it gurgling like the tummy of an overfed infant, La Conner is nevertheless expansive in other, less tangible ways. Amidst the marsh grass and driftwood, the cattails and silt beds (the campus of the Academy of Mud), it’s not overly fanciful here to think of blue herons wading in paint jars or poets throwing blackberries at the moon.

Morris Graves was the first artist to settle in La Conner. It was 1937 and Graves was more than a decade away from art-world stardom. He was, in fact, so poor at the time that he lived in a burned-out house, the charred floors of which he’d covered with sand, raking it to resemble the sand gardens of the famous Zen temple in Kyoto. Bearded, gaunt, birdlike, he walked around town with a length of old rope holding up his pants, an intense but benevolent flame in his eyes. People didn’t know what to make of him at first. Unfamiliar with the term “bohemian,” and as “beatnik” and “hippie” hadn’t been coined yet, some locals -- desperate for a category, a label -- decided he must be a Nazi spy. It wasn’t long, however, before Graves (imbued with an almost supernatural presence) won them over.

Single-handedly, Morris Graves raised the consciousness of La Conner, paving the way for other artists (a few themselves on the long road to fame), art lovers, and the usual hangers-on to settle here. Beautiful, peaceful, private, and inexpensive, it became also, thanks to Graves’s pioneering, that rarity: a small rural community welcoming to strangers, culturally hip, tolerant of eccentric dress and eccentric behavior. In little La Conner, you could -- and can -- be yourself to the fullest extent of yourself, a freedom you normally would have to go to a large city to enjoy.

There was yet another feature attractive to impecunious creative types. Or maybe just to me. Immediately to the east of town were seemingly endless fields of vegetables: cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, and beets, grown not for the fresh produce markets but for seed, and thus left unharvested for conveniently long periods of time. Convenient, that is, for Terrie and me, who regularly would embark on midnight produce raids. Having quit the
P-I
to concentrate exclusively on my second novel, I’d become, by circumstance, unfamiliar to the cashiers at Thrifty Foods and Safeway. Our pillage, while not really putting a dent in any farmer’s crop, provided needed nourishment and even a taste of romantic adventure, the ever-present risk of apprehension offset by the almost surreal beauty of the fields, where long rows upon rows of cabbage, rotund and silvery in the moonlight, suggested the marbles in a game of Chinese checkers set up for the amusement of the Jolly Green Giant.

Keith and Maxine Wyman, the older couple who’d introduced me to the pleasures of the mushroom hunt, the bird watch, and the bacchanalian salmon barbecue, and who’d become in a sense my surrogate parents, had finally found a small but charming house I could rent in La Conner, and Terrie and I moved into it on April 1, 1970. (I recommend that you make all of your major moves on the first of April. Just in case.) That September, as the cabbage went to seed, spelling an end to our surreptitious agricultural subsidies, the
ARA
advance money arrived from Doubleday. For Terrie, I filled a larder with conventionally procured supplies. Then I bought myself an airline ticket to Tokyo.

Ever since my troop ship sailed out of Yokohama Harbor in late 1955, I’d longed to return to Japan. It was that longing that had lured me to Seattle, where, I’d hoped, graduate study at the UW Far East Institute could lead to work as a correspondent in Asia. I’d been waylaid by visual art, a consuming seductress, but now here I was, fifteen years later, buying my own ticket to that weird and exquisite land where jujitsu warriors wrote nature poems, stunningly sexy women kept crickets as pets, and nary a geisha would raise a plucked eyebrow should I decide to chow down on a chrysanthemum. It wasn’t merely a rainbow chase, however; I had a legitimate, practical reason for flying to Japan: as research for my second novel, I needed to see some whooping cranes.

Now, you needn’t be an ornithologist to know there aren’t any whooping cranes in Japan. Ah so. Whoopers -- and there was only one small, imperiled flock of them extant in 1970 -- summer at a remote lake in northern Canada, winter on a protected island off the Texas coast. In neither location was it possible to get close enough to view them in any meaningful way. There is, however, a somewhat compact version of “our” majestic crane that summers in Siberia and spends the rest of the year in northernmost Japan, where, at a park near the city of Kushiro, they can be observed without the aid of binoculars. Known as the
tancho zuru,
this bird has identical markings to its larger North American cousin, which is to say black wing tips and a bright red “skullcap.” (By the time the bird guys got around to naming cranes, I guess “cardinal” had been used up, though for all I know
tancho zuru
means “pope” in Japanese.)

In the novel I’d just begun, whooping cranes were to serve both as hostages and as living inspiration for the illegal occupiers of the largest all-girl ranch in the west, the birds chosen (doubtlessly in a spasm of anthropomorphism) for what I perceived as their conscious, defiant decision to risk extinction rather than conform; rather than alter their ancient patterns of behavior to accommodate the gassy, brassy intrusions of Homo sapiens, an invasive species that is by nature an unnatural animal. In any case, research led me to believe that the
tancho
zuru
would serve as an adequate substitute, a visual model, for the more evasive whoopers, so I set out across the Pacific to look them over.

Darrell Bob Houston was already in Japan. He’d landed an Alicia Patterson Foundation journalism grant to study and write regular reports on the subject “Youth in Asia.” (When he first told me about it, as I was leaving the
P-I,
I thought he meant “euthanasia,” which not only creeped me out but struck me as odd, Japanese being traditionally so well versed in hara-kiri they shouldn’t require outside help in ending it all.) Darrell Bob met my flight and after a copious introduction to Asahi beer at a sushi joint, he set me up in the tiny one-room apartment he’d rented as writing-studio-cum-love-nest for trysts with his Japanese paramour, Yoko. (Not
that
Yoko.) My Tarzanesque pal was married, you see, and his Seattle family had recently joined him in Tokyo.

The room was in Otsuka, a working-class district, and it sat above a kind of greasy chopstick restaurant named Ichi-ban. It was in that plain but self-aggrandizing eatery (
ichi-ban
in translation is “number one”) that I took my nightly dinner as I waited for D.B. and Yoko (she lived with her parents in an upscale neighborhood) to find time to accompany me on my hunt for the surrogate whooping crane. After dinner, night after night, as typhoon-season rains drenched Tokyo, I’d sip beer and watch European (including Czech and Yugoslavian) movies with Japanese subtitles on the Ichi-ban’s twenty-four-inch black-and-white TV.

One night the feature film was American. A World War II drama about U.S. airmen flying missions over Germany (Japan’s wartime ally), its dialogue had been dubbed so that the American pilots were all spouting Japanese. Sitting there by myself amidst a scattering of non-English-speaking trolly workers, drinking Asahi and watching a global hodgepodge of a movie while a furious rain lashed the cement-and-rice-paper facade of that dingy building alongside the tracks, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more disoriented and alone. Or more thoroughly, serenely, at home. Every true romantic will know what I mean.

In Japan, my typical ensemble included faded jeans, rodeo shirt, leather vest, black cowboy hat, and a short, stiff lasso with which any suburban New Jersey tenderfoot could have performed ersatz rope tricks. Why? I’d had the dumb idea that the Japanese would be as surprised and delighted to encounter an American cowboy in their midst as an American might be to come across a friendly samurai warrior on the streets of, say, Cheyenne or Little Rock. Wrong! Oh, they were surprised all right, but that turned out to be the problem.

Whenever I met someone on the street, he or she would immediately avert their eyes. Occasionally, pedestrians would stop dead in their tracks and turn their back on me until I had safely passed them by. The first time I rode the train, the person I sat down next to rose and moved to the far end of the car. When, with a puzzled expression, I looked to the passenger on my other side for sympathy or at least an explanation, he got up and moved, as well. Such rejection became a regular occurrence. Did the citizens of Tokyo harbor a deep-seated hatred of cowboys? Did they blame Hopalong Cassidy and Billy the Kid for bombing their city back in the forties? Wasn’t the great film director Akira Kurosawa heavily influenced by American westerns?

As I was soon to learn, the Japanese are not a spontaneous people. The Japanese are not fond of surprises. As emotionally fettered by their ancient traditions as they are aesthetically enriched by them, Japanese stoically recoil from any public display of feeling, or any event that might catch them off guard and precipitate a perceived loss of face. They’ve loosened up noticeably in recent years, but in 1970, loss of face remained a fate next to death. All that legendary politeness? The truth is, when the Japanese bow and mutter, “So sorry, so sorry,” what they are really saying is, “Ten thousand curses on me for ever finding myself in a position where I am indebted, however slightly and briefly, to
you
.”

The lone place in Tokyo where my cowboy drag was appreciated wasn’t the Ichi-ban, where both staff and clientele exhibited persistent indifference, but, rather, a little
okonomiyaki
joint a couple of blocks away, where I usually lunched.

Okonomiyaki
is a dish with an identity crisis: it doesn’t seem to know if it’s an omelet or a pizza. It’s round and flat like a pizza, but has the eggy consistency of an omelet, albeit an omelet topped with chicken, shrimp, or octopus (diner’s choice) and slathered with a tangy dark brown preparation (“bulldog” in translation) composed of soy sauce, spices, and apple butter. The place in my Otsuka neighborhood served nothing but
okonomiyaki,
which it cooked directly in front of each individual diner on a long narrow grill that ran the length of the counter.

The two countermen had hair almost as long as my own -- a rarity in Japan in 1970 -- and in me seemed to recognize a kindred spirit, grinning like short-order Buddhas when I presented them with color postcards depicting cowboys on horseback and Indian chiefs in full headdress. I signed the cards “Buffalo Silver,” the name I decided to travel under in Japan, and when I’d enter the establishment after a morning of visiting Zen temples and Shinto shrines, they’d shout out in unison, “Buffaro Sirver!” The rest of our discourse, once I selected my choice of topping, consisted entirely of loud and abrupt exchanges of band names. Apropos of nothing beyond camaraderie, I’d suddenly exclaim, “Grateful Dead!” and one of them would yell back, “Rorring Stones!” I’d shout “Beach Boys!” and they’d respond, “Beaters!” As a traveler in a strange land, I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a more satisfying conversation.

On what haiku master Basho called “the road to the far north,” we sorely tested the Japanese tolerance for exuberant public display: “Buffalo Silver” in his dopey cowpoke outfit, six-foot-five Darrell Bob signing inn registers as “Victor Mature Jr.” (after an actor he believed -- incorrectly -- he resembled more closely than he did Johnny Weissmuller); and diminutive Yoko, who presented herself in English to her disapproving northern countrymen as “Miss Chocolate Cake,” a tribute to the thing she most admired about Western civilization.

On trains, encouraged by quantities of beer, we were as unrestrained in our deportment (having led Yoko egregiously astray) as the Japanese passengers were closed and reserved, believing all the while, as we sang Hank Williams tunes, drummed on Asahi cans with chopsticks, and occasionally exercised in the aisles, that we were setting an example of how less tiresome life can be when people relax their grip on their egos and indulge the innate human capacity for playfulness; though in actual fact we were probably just assuaging any lingering guilt the Japanese might have harbored about Pearl Harbor.

(Hmmm? Remembering Pearl Harbor, I must concede that under certain conditions the Japanese have, indeed, demonstrated an affection for surprise.)

Kushiro proved to be a drab, dog-bitten port city, reeking of urine and fish, and enveloped in a gray air of unspecified danger. It was as different from Tokyo as Marseille is from Paris; it could have been Palermo to Kyoto’s Florence. The fact that its lone movie theater had external speakers and that the sound track blaring for two grimy blocks along the waterfront was that of
Rebel Without a Cause
(it was as if Natalie Wood, my boyhood goddess, my first herald of oceanic love, was once again addressing my heart, lighting my way in this shadowy town) contributed to a municipal ambience that was less cosmopolitan than it was just plain queer.

Thus it seemed only fitting when, the next morning, as we boarded the bus that would take us to the crane sanctuary, five or six kilometers out of town, the bus station sound system was broadcasting an American march, the one with the alternative lyrics that begin “Be kind to your fine-feathered friends . . .” Nor was the park itself any less of a bicultural oddity, for one entered it on foot through a gate in the largest Coca-Cola billboard I have ever seen. On an arch above the billboard were words in Japanese and English. The English read:
SACRED CRANES/AKAN NATURALEY PARK
. Naturaley.