Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (32 page)
Read Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life Online
Authors: Tom Robbins
Cuba, fine. Sumatra, fine. Namibia, Tanzania, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, fine. But what about Disneyland?
I’ve journeyed through Mexico and Guatemala with the esteemed scholar Joseph Campbell, exploring ancient ceremonial sites by day, and at night sipping gin-and-tonics on the verandas of tropical hotels while Campbell took what we’d learned that day in the field and weaved it into the whole glorious, fantastic tapestry of world history and mythology. I’ve traveled in Greece and Sicily with the laureate of the labyrinth and gladly grim Grimm Brothers gadfly Robert Bly, visiting the ruined temples of the gods and finding in the godly stories revealing insights into familiar human affairs. For sheer fulfillment, however, neither of those enlightening trips surpassed taking my son Fleetwood to Disneyland.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware that the Mickey Mouse myth is just that, mickey mouse. And the Magic Kingdom is to the Pyramid of the Magicians at Uxmal what Kool-Aid is to French champagne: deficient in cosmological sparkle and psychological depth. Seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old, Disneyland does present a vibrant, fanciful contrast to the mundane monotonies of everyday existence, and some of the rides are undeniably fun, yet even young Fleet became quickly aware that the trumped-up wonders inside the theme park paled beside the genuine working miracle to which he was introduced in our nearby hotel. I’m referring here to room service.
It might not surpass the wheel, the matchstick, kissing, or quantum physics, but room service definitely ranks near the top of the list of humankind’s greatest inventions; and while Fleetwood was hardly immune to the thrill of Space Mountain and the dizzy charm of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ride, hotel room service was the white rabbit that led his imagination into fabulous new territory. We’d arrived in Anaheim late in the day, so I’d ordered dinner sent to our room. So enthralled was he at how that process worked, I let him call in our breakfast order. After that, we took all of our meals in the room and Fleet did the ordering. He always ordered far too much and none too healthily, but what the hell? We were on vacation.
By the third day, he had waiters knocking at our door every half hour or so, and our room was a wasteland of half-eaten cheeseburgers and melting chocolate sundaes. On our last day (though unintentional, I suppose it was his grand finale), two waiters showed up at our door with an extra-large cart and began setting out so many silver-domed plates and platters it resembled an aerial view of an old Russian city. Uncovered, the vast assortment of dips and canapés could have quelled the munchie madness of eight or nine stoners after a night at a hemp fest. Fleet had unwittingly ordered the hospitality menu, meant for in-room meetings or private parties during conventions.
Needless to say, the two of us made not a furrow in that fulgent field of finger food, and Fleet, eventually bored with the largess, elected to put pieces of it to a more captivating purpose. Playing bombardier, he began with much delight to drop pieces of the banquet on people in the parking lot below. Since we were on the eighth floor, I quickly drew the line at cheese balls and ice cubes, but didn’t restrain him from discharging peanuts or olives, and shared in his glee when he scored the infrequent direct hit. A victim’s reaction, in its bewilderment, topped any expression we’d observed in Disneyland proper, including at the Haunted Castle. The high point occurred when he bounced a slice of dill pickle off the yarmulke of a dark-bearded gentleman, who, after picking up the pickle that had struck him, stared skyward for what seemed like several minutes, and while from that distance his words were not exactly clear, I could swear he exclaimed, “Nosh from heaven!”
Ah, but the fun wasn’t quite over. The following morning, our last there, we were joined by a young woman with whom I’d been corresponding but had never met. Katherine was a pine-tree heiress and gifted psychic from East Texas, who was living in England (where a year later she would guide Fleet and me on a tour of Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, the Avebury Circle, and other Anglo-astro landmarks of the pre-Arthurian occult) but was back in the U.S. visiting family. After our farewell swing through the Magic Kingdom, I, flush with my
Woodpecker
advance, bought her a ticket so she could accompany us on our flight home. For better or for worse, I was done with hitchhiking and the Greyhound bus (and there really was a lingering sense of loss, the loss of a special brand of freedom, a freedom never known by the materially ambitious or those to the manor born).
Down in the Caribbean I once heard a guy proclaim, “Lookin’ good is da main ting, mon,” and we were looking pretty good when we boarded that Seattle-bound plane: Fleetwood sporting a spotless white T-shirt and his new Mickey Mouse wristwatch, advising us of the time every six or eight minutes; Katherine in a billowy summer dress of polar white, me in the white linen suit I’d worn in Havana, the three of us radiating such an aura of dove-down whiteness we might have been created on the spot by God’s own breath (though that watch, like all timepieces, was surely the Devil’s doing).
In the air, we petitioned the flight attendant for a deck of cards, which we put to use in a three-handed round of crazy eights, a favorite of Fleet’s as well as a diversion made all the more pleasant for us adults by the readily refillable glasses of red wine. It was an idyllic scene (Katherine in the window seat, me on the aisle, Fleet in the middle) that, were it not for the vino, it might have made a commercial for a family-oriented travel agency, and who would have noticed that neither Katherine nor I wore wedding rings? Now, crazy eights is not a game that demands a hefty expenditure of intellectual capital, but there is a wee bit of strategy involved and any game worth a tick of one’s time, including croquet and Scrabble, is worth playing with fervor, so each of us made a serious if manufactured effort to beat the pants off the others.
The first game went down to the wire, with Katherine eventually prevailing. Luck was on my side in game two. In the third game, Fleet dominated all the way -- until the end, when with the very last card I beat him out. Yes, I know, I should have just let my young son win, but as reported, we were playing as if the personal stakes were high and my competitive spirit momentarily trumped my paternal fidelity.
In disappointment and disgust at losing by what in basketball would have been termed a “buzzer beater,” Fleet smacked the folding tray, our card table, with his fist. As everybody knows, those airline trays are rickety. Most of the cards stayed on the tray but Katherine’s recently filled glass of red wine flew off and emptied itself up and down her Easter-white dress, while the other glass and its entire contents landed with a small but portentous splash in my lap.
We sat there momentarily stunned, Katherine and me, soaked with a mediocre merlot, until a flight attendant, after surveying in horror what must have looked like the aftermath of an ax attack, hurried back with a comforting smile -- and four bottles (two for each of us) of club soda. Speaking from experience, she assured us that if we immediately doused our garments with the soda water, the wine would not leave a stain. Taking her at her word and having no real alternative, we hustled with the bottles of seltzer to the toilet at the rear of the plane and, squeezing in together, set about resoaking ourselves, skeptically but with determination. And it worked.
It worked. The seltzer actually absorbed the merlot and did it far more quickly than an old wino’s liver might, but it still took a long time. By Fleet’s Mickey Mouse watch, we were jammed in that compartment, scrubbing, for at least twenty minutes. Meanwhile, a line had formed outside the toilet, for it was at that stage in a flight when all the passengers’ bladders seemed to reach flood stage in unison, a renal symphony in P sharp. People began first to sheepishly rap, then to bang with some urgency, on the door.
Imagine the looks on their faces when the toilet door finally opened and out stepped two people, a well-dressed man and woman, both sopping wet, especially below the waist. It makes me smile even now to recall their expressions (children bewildered, adults outraged or maybe envious) as they tried to picture -- or tried
not
to picture -- what sort of kinky business might have just transpired in that cramped cubbyhole of a public loo (aware, if only intuitively, that Eros, though a plump little bugger, has been known to unfold his salty wings in some very tight quarters); and wondering if it would be hygienic, or even morally permissible to go in there now.
Although I’d found my first three books to be generally satisfying from an artistic perspective, and though they’d attracted a loyal following among readers who’d discovered a slice of Tibetan peach pie to be their just dessert after far too many predictable potlucks of good old meat-and-potatoes American social realism (how many protagonists can one watch come painfully of age, how many bad marriages resolve or dissolve; and after a while who really gives a damn if the butler did it?); despite those early successes, I don’t think I hit my stride as a novelist until
Jitterbug Perfume
. Published in 1984, it remains, aside from
Still Life With Woodpecker,
my most popular novel, perhaps because it explores from a fresh perspective the pervasive human yearning to somehow nullify that death sentence that each of us is handed at birth, and dramatizes without sentimentality the possibility of an eternal romantic love.
Jitterbug Perfume
was followed in 1990 by
Skinny Legs and All,
a novel inspired not by the Joe Tex tune from which I took the title but by a fascination with the biblical bad girls: Delilah, Jezebel, Bathsheba, Lot’s horny daughters, and most especially Salome, upon whose so-called Dance of the Seven Veils the book is systematically structured, the dropping of each veil signifying the casting off of one of the illusions that limit human advancement. Set in modern times against a backdrop of the New York art world,
Skinny Legs and All
explores the Jewish/Arab conflict from both an interpersonal and a mythological perspective, and shoves so many pies in the collective face of fundamentalist/apocalyptic Christianity that, considering the violent nature of some true believers, I thought it might be a good idea to accept the invitation I received that June to travel to Moscow with a high school marching band.
The opportunity was provided by my friend Lee Frederick, a basketball star at Bradley University who went on to coach in college and with the Detroit Pistons. Lee had given up coaching to form Sports Tours International, a specialized travel company that organizes tournaments and takes U.S. collegiate sports teams to play and soak up a little culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. His clients are mostly basketball and volleyball programs, but he once organized an overseas tour for a chess team, and now he’d been hired to take to Russia a champion high school marching band from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He wondered if I’d like to come along. Well, yeah.
Lee and I hooked up in Amsterdam, where I sometimes go to take the waters, and flew to Moscow together on Aeroflot. His staff had been in Russia for some weeks and everything was organized. The Wisconsin group arrived in Moscow the same day as Lee and I, and all of us were quartered at a quite large and quite bleak (Soviet chic) hotel on the outskirts of the city. That evening, in a dining room nearly the size of Stalin’s paranoia, Lee spoke to the assembly and introduced his staff to the band, its directors, and its entourage: there were seventy-five kids in the New Richmond Marching Tigers and it seemed as if every other one of them had a chaperone. At one point, I stood and was introduced simply as “an American writer” with no hint that I might be on the run from Jerry Falwell.
The following day, the band -- all seventy-five uniformed members -- assembled on the hotel grounds for a brief rehearsal. It was at that point that I noticed the drum majorette. She was hard to miss: very tall, very blond, striking in her white boots, plumed cap, and short skirt; commanding in the way she twirled, tossed, and caught a baton. She was obviously the prettiest girl in school, the reigning social queen of New Richmond High. As I admired her teen-queen confidence, her regal bearing, her polished moves, I decided to have a little fun.
During a break, I sidled up to her, and with a stern expression said softly, “I know I was introduced last night as a writer, but” -- lowering my voice another octave now and glancing furtively over my shoulder -- “but I’m actually with the Central Intelligence Agency. My assignment here in Moscow is to protect
you
.” I paused for her to take that in. “In public you’ll be on my radar at all times. In private, should you ever detect anything even vaguely threatening, my room number here is 804.”
Her blue eyes, naturally large, seemed to widen to the circumference of Frisbees, but before she could utter a word I turned on my heel and strode away. All that week, as the band marched through Red Square, Gorky Park, and along Moscow’s broader boulevards, toodling, tooting, trumpeting, and generally blasting “Jesus Christ Superstar,” its signature number (amazing, baffling, and sometimes obviously disgusting the Russians, who’d never seen or heard anything remotely like it), I, too, marched along -- off to the side, over in the gutter -- but staying always abreast of the drum majorette, careful to match her stride for stride. From time to time, I’d catch her eye and nod ever so discreetly, indicating that the situation was under control, that I had her back, and by the second day, she would acknowledge me with her schoolgirl version of a conspiratorial smile.
Our “relationship,” if it could be called that (it was as much a prank as a flirtation), progressed no further, as well as it shouldn’t have: I was in my fifties, she eighteen and surrounded at all times by a battalion of such sturdy, cheese-fed, vigilant Wisconsin chaperones they could have prevented King Kong from getting within an arm’s length of Fay Wray. (Potential hanky-panky was also thwarted due to my having met in 1987 the love of my life, a milepost encounter about which I’ll have more to say later.)
So nothing came of it -- except that for years now, somewhere in Middle America, a former drum majorette has been reminding her husband and her children that in Russia she had her own CIA agent. “Is that for real, Mom?” one of the kids will ask, and she’ll slowly crank up that old clandestine smile and answer, “Yes, it’s true. He had a beard and was kinda cute. His name was Tom, and I guess he also wrote books on the side.” And in his English-lit class, her oldest son will tell the teacher, “My mom used to be guarded by Tom Clancy.”
Sometime in 1986, I performed a wedding ceremony for a couple in Seattle. Am I legally qualified to officiate at weddings? Yes, in a sense, and so are you, but let’s not get into that here. Suffice to say that of the five couples I’ve joined in holy matrimony, only one has been torn asunder, a record even a Roman Catholic priest would be hard-pressed to equal. In any event, weddings always seem to make me amorous (funerals, as well, but that’s another subject we should skip for now), and once the vows had been exchanged and pronounced that afternoon, I started looking around for female companionship.
Having spotted a cute little blonde who appeared unattached, I introduced myself, and there being no food at this rite except wedding cake, I suggested she and I repair to some venue de victuals for a bite to eat. She not only agreed but volunteered that she was night manager at a large restaurant on Lake Union, where we might dine well and for free. We did enjoy a reasonably good meal, and though I ended up paying the bill after all, I had no complaints. Not that night, at any rate. However, in the weeks that followed, Kathleen commenced to pursue me, sending me cards, flowers, and fine cigars. I didn’t encourage this behavior but neither did I strongly object: flowers are pretty and as the firm of Twain, Kipling & Freud has seen fit to remind us, a good cigar is a smoke.
When one Tuesday late in the year, Kathleen telephoned to report that she would be traveling up to San Juan Island for a long weekend and would like to stop off in La Conner on Friday night and take me to dinner, I agreed. I had no plans for Friday and as the saying goes, “Give me liberty or give me dinner.” Kathleen neglected to mention that she would be accompanied by a young woman she had recently befriended, one Alexa d’Avalon, an actress who’d been attracting quite a following for her insightful tarot readings at a Seattle cabaret called the Pink Door. Neither did she disclose that she’d shown Alexa an article about me in
People
magazine (once again,
People
was to influence my life), declaring, “I’m going to marry Tom Robbins and have his babies.”
On the drive north, Kathleen warned Alexa, “If Tom and I get something going romantically tonight, you’ll have to sleep in the car.” Never mind that she’d made the all too common error of using “romantic” as a synonym for “sexual”; never mind that vocabulary malfunction, it was December, the car in question happened to belong to Alexa -- and it was a VW Bug.
We spent a pleasant evening. Alexa was as tall and jet of hair as Kathleen was petite and fair, and sitting between them at dinner I felt as if I was sandwiched between the dual aspects -- the dark and the light, the life-giver and the destroyer -- of the universal goddess, though admittedly that notion didn’t occur to me until midway through my third Bloody Mary. After dinner -- for which I paid, Kathleen making no demonstrable move for the check -- we repaired to my nearby house for a toke and further conversation. There, Alexa and I had a lengthy discussion about my mineral collection, with me arguing that I admired rock crystals for their physical beauty alone, regarding their alleged healing properties to be even more suspect than those of certain TV evangelists, who, I’m convinced, are more likely to cause indigestion, anal strictures, and nervous breakdowns than to cure them. Impatient with this two-way discussion and sensing that she and I weren’t going to be making any babies that evening, Kathleen announced it was time to go.
At the door, Kathleen and I exchanged a brief good-bye kiss. Then Alexa, who’d been following behind, turned up her face in kiss mode, too. Now, while I’d certainly liked Alexa well enough, I hadn’t felt any strong attraction to her. In preparation for a rustic weekend on San Juan, she was dressed, boots to cap, like a boy. I’d actually been unsure of her sex when she’d first arrived. But with that kiss . . . It was chaste, not so much as a bubble of saliva or flicker of tongue tip, yet it was somehow magnetically charged to a degree that for reasons beyond our intent or control -- an instinctive reaction, an automatic, involuntary response -- we kissed a second time, just as briefly but with just as much voltage. (What was that about?) Then the boy/girl departed and that was that.
No, not quite. Feeling bad that Kathleen had conned me out of another meal (apparently her modus operandi), Alexa sent me a letter the following week apologizing for her friend and thanking me for dinner. I responded with a note of my own, assuring her that conning food and drink was all part of Kathleen’s Irish charm, to which I had no particular objection. I thanked Alexa for her concern, and in regard to an upcoming theatrical audition to which she’d alluded, wished her multiple fractures in the lower appendage of her choice. And that, I once again assumed, was that.
I ought to explain that I was living alone at the time, an unusual arrangement for me, and for once I was thoroughly content with domestic solitude. Surely I’d long been aware that one can never hope to live harmoniously with another until one has learned to live contentedly with oneself, but such was my deep appreciation of female companionship that I’d seldom put that awareness into practice. Now, however, since the amiable termination a few years earlier of a torrid relationship with savory Donna Davis, a union defined most markedly by the size, scope, and frequency of the blips we made on each other’s bedroom radar, I’d been traveling alone and finding the company most satisfactory. Yes, I was dating the prominent sculptor Ginny Ruffner, an extraordinarily talented, intelligent, and delightful individual, but both of us being Southern, Cancerian, art-oriented, and fiercely independent, we were simply too much alike to suit Cupid. So I’d been semi-reclusive for a while and enjoying it to the point of being almost prideful about it. In other words, ripe for a fall.
Christmas -- that old pagan holiday that seems to come once every ten years when one is a child and once every ten days when one grows up -- was again bearing down on an ill-prepared populace; and Alexa, still feeling a tad guilty about Kathleen’s little con, decided to send me a token gift. The present she chose was a key chain, one of those “magic wand” affairs in which the chain itself is attached to a clear plastic cylinder filled with a viscous fluid in which is suspended a churning galaxy of tiny colored stars. As she prepared to wrap this trinket (which I still possess, by the way), her gay housemate Eddie scolded her for the impropriety of giving someone a key chain without a key attached, whereupon he removed from his own chain a key which he claimed unlocked the door to “some drag queen’s apartment.” As befitting its history, I suppose, they made the key more festive by painting it with purple nail polish.
A week or two after Christmas, I mailed Alexa a note, thanking her for the magic wand. As much out of politeness as any burning curiosity, I also inquired as to what lock might be opened with that small purple key. She responded directly and succinctly, “It’s the key to your heart.” (Now what could she mean by that?) She also happened to include, as if an afterthought, her telephone number. Later, she was to profess that she’d never before been so forward or so bold.
So yes, I did call her but not right away and it wasn’t until I heard her speak -- Alexa has a phone voice that if properly channeled could defrost Lapland and half of Siberia -- that I decided to invite her (sans Kathleen) to dinner. Even so, my invitation was contingent upon her driving the sixty-five miles to La Conner. (So self-contained was I, so disinterested in anything remotely resembling a relationship, that I wouldn’t even make the effort to meet her in Seattle.) She agreed, and it was on January 17, 1987, that she rapped on my door -- stood there in high heels and a tight chic dress, lips rouged, hair beautifully coiffed, looking no more like a boy than a Ferrari looks like an oxcart -- stood there radiating a level of vivacity that caused the ink to run on my personal Declaration of Independence.
Surely Oscar Wilde was pulling our leg when he advised us to choose our friends for their beauty and our enemies for their intelligence, yet it can undeniably heighten the pleasure of a meal if the diner across the table surpasses in his or her good looks the sesame bread sticks or the mustard jar. On the other hand, unless one is oneself a shallow twit, ennui is bound to set in long before the dessert course should the personality of one’s dinner date prove less substantial than the odd sprig of parsley, if they have nothing stimulating or at least colorful to say. Based on our first meeting, I was reasonably certain that Alexa would not buckle under the weight of conversation, but just in case the professional psychic should turn out to be a New Age airhead after all, I had the proprietor/chef of La Conner’s best restaurant procure a bottle of Cristal champagne (normally not on the wine list) and have it chilling in a bucket of ice at our table. This most blissful of beverages was my insurance policy against a dull or disappointing evening. Sure, Cristal is expensive, but so is Blue Cross and Mutual of Omaha.