Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (14 page)

Traditionally, kimchi was napa cabbage that, seasoned with hot chilies and garlic and soaked in brine, was buried in an earthenware crock for several months or until fermentation occurred. There are variations in which radishes, turnips, and/or cucumbers are added to the cabbage, but the fermentation is essential -- and the effect is the same: after one has eaten kimchi, one’s breath could run a train. It could also run off any GI, marine, or airman -- no matter how romantically inclined, how fervently propelled forward by testosterone -- who happened to find his olfactory receptors enveloped in an alien halitosis so powerful it could pour a tank of herbicide on the reddest rose of passion.

Kissing a kimchi eater is one thing, eating kimchi is another, and while I was not all together unlike my fellow servicemen in my aversion to the former, I came to join the ranks of the latter, introduced at my insistence to the indomitable dish by a darling girl who called herself “Sally” (odds are her real name was Kim), and whose warnings I ignored, creating some displeasure at the weather station since my entire supply of Listerine mouthwash was being funneled to Chairman Mao.

I continue to eat kimchi today, albeit by necessity the made-in-America version. American kimchi? Indeed, it’s possible to find refrigerated jars of the stuff in a fair number of U.S. supermarkets and specialty food stores, especially on the West Coast; and while it can add piquancy to tuna sandwiches or bowls of pork with steamed rice, it’s pretty much a pale shadow of the authentic Korean product. The problem is that here the ingredients have rarely been fermented. It’s possible today to ferment cabbage without burying it in the ground all winter (a Vietnamese woman in La Conner, Washington, made me some in her garage: moonshine kimchi), but in deference to Yankee sensibilities, most preserved cabbage in this country (in Japan, as well) is actually pickled rather than fermented. I call it “kimchi lite.”

Kimchi lite is to authentic Korean kimchi what a lapdog is to a timber wolf, what a billiards game is to a rugby match, what Disneyland is to Burning Man, what a golf cart is to a hot-rod Lincoln, what the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is to the Rolling Stones, what a sparkler is to a thunder cracker, what Curious George is to King Kong, what . . . well, you get the picture. Kimchi lite can enliven a tuna sandwich but hard-core Korean kimchi rocks the world.

“You eat kimchi,” Sally warned me, “you wife-san no like you. She catchy catchy ’nother man.” The petite bargirl had laughed uproariously when I swallowed my first bite of kimchi. (“I cry for funny,” she gasped), but she was seriously prophetic in regard to my wife, although Peggy’s animosity had zero to do with Korean cuisine. Or with Korean bargirls, for that matter. We were drifting -- no, motorboating -- apart before I’d gone abroad.

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it’s to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic. Peggy was thoroughly unimpressed when I won an air force short-story contest; I quietly scoffed at her fashion magazines, her fascination with the financial potential of Florida real estate. (I’d been stationed at a base outside of Orlando, tracking potential hurricanes.) The sporadic letters she’d sent me in Korea were approximately as affectionate as a foreclosure notice. Written with a blunt instrument. Dipped in zombie blood.

Returning home aboard a troopship bound for Seattle, I’d scored a gig as editor of the ship’s newspaper (a thin mimeographed rag distributed daily), thereby avoiding both KP and nightly internment down in the fart-infested rat warrens where troops were stacked like cordwood: I instead shared a comfortable cabin with a trio of medics. Under the nom de plume “Figmo Fosdick,” I also wrote a satirical humor column called
Shipboard Confidential,
which, though popular with the troops, frequently put me at odds with the paper’s adviser, a Roman Catholic chaplin who possessed the purplish physiognomy and perpetually petulant pucker of the overly zealous censor. I wouldn’t insinuate that the good priest ever touched a choirboy, but he certainly molested my prose.

At any rate, I had little time for contemplation during the crossing, so when after a fortnight we docked in Seattle, I elected to take a Greyhound bus to Virginia, thereby saving airfare and giving myself four uninterrupted days on the road to ponder my situation.

Prior to my deployment to Asia, Peggy had been my one and only sexual partner. Now I’d rolled on the futon with five Korean girls -- Kim, Kim, Kim, Kim, and Sally -- and an extremely lovely Japanese woman named Reiko. I’d “sown my wild oats,” to borrow that dated agrarian phrase, and was thinking that I was now ready to “settle down,” to employ another grandpa expression, with Peggy and our son Rip (born just before I shipped out to Korea), and “build a life” (the clichés just kept on rolling). Moreover, when I finally arrived in Richmond, I took one look at Peggy and fell in love with her all over again. Alas, the feelings were less than mutual.

The frigidity of my welcome would have inspired the hardiest Eskimo to huddle with the sled dogs. Peggy had been strewing some feral cereal of her own it seems, and was, in fact, pregnant with another man’s child. Deserved or not, the rejection ripped through my heart like a rusty can opener, wounding me so deeply that for years thereafter it would pop up like a jeering jack in my dreams.

You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn’t evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it’s a
privilege
to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

Hmmm. That last sentence reminds me of my gallbladder.

In 2006, an ultrasound exam discovered enough stones in my gallbladder to pave a Zen walkway. A few weeks later, I had the rock-strewn organ removed. The surgery went well, but I was kept in the hospital overnight. I was also pumped full of happy juice. The drug’s identity I do not know, but with it singing in my veins, pushing my mental pedal to the metal, I was merrily awake all night long, during which time I wrote an entire self-help book in my head.

I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating. Hour after hour, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, chapter after chapter, I composed an entire self-help book. Toward dawn, I finally fell asleep, however, and when they woke me several hours later, the only part of the book I could recall was its title:
How to Lose Every Hand and Still Come Out a Winner.

That’s correct:
How to Lose Every Hand and Still Come Out a Winner
. If only I could have remembered the accompanying text, there is no doubt whatsoever that the book would have sold twenty million copies and placed me in the company of mega-motivator
Tony
Robbins. Maybe that’s why I forgot it.

17

god bless bohemia

Upon returning from overseas in 1955, I stumbled into an America I had barely known existed, a country within a country; or more precisely, a state within a state; a state of being that is usually referred to as “bohemia,” although it has nothing to do with Czechoslovakia, and of which I have remained to this day a denizen. (“Citizen” is too licit a word, and anyway, when necessary I’ve managed to keep one foot in mainstream bourgeois society, which is to say, in enemy territory.)

Now, I’d checked out Greenwich Village in the months before my juvenile marriage, but the place had seemed more foreign to me then than Japan or Korea; and having no guide, no interpreter, no valid passport, nor even a proper frame of reference, I wasn’t merely an outsider, I was like a deaf man at the opera or a blind man at the circus. Ironically, it was my estranged wife who introduced me to what would in a few years be labeled (and often libeled) as the “counterculture.” A materialist Peggy might have been, but she was also a party girl, and in conservative Richmond it was the bohemian artists and intellectuals, genuine or fake, who hosted -- informally, of course -- the liveliest and most frequent soirees.

There’s an area of urban Richmond known as the Fan District, a charming neighborhood, by and large, and home to the largest concentration of artists and arty hangers-on between New York and New Orleans. (Of the Fan I’ll have more stories to tell later: I came to live there in 1957 after my discharge from the air force.) Peggy was taking lessons in ballroom dancing, and it was a gay dance instructor named Chubby, though he was as skinny as a chopstick, who initiated her into the Fan party scene. On my second night back, following my cross-country bus ride, Peggy let me tag along to a gathering at a painting studio. Within an hour, she’d disappeared, and I did not see her again that evening, but the sting of being abandoned was lessened considerably by my acute fascination with the odd new world into which I’d been dumped. It was bohemia, baby, and while I wasn’t exactly wonder-struck, I was undeniably captivated.

In Japan, I’d marveled at wood-block prints, but until that evening in Richmond, I’d seen modern paintings only in reproductions, and not many of those. A Hokusai print is exquisite in its draftsmanship and poignant in the way it penetrates and distills the very essence of nature, but such refinement can be drowned out by the sheer bravura of a big modern canvas, especially one upon which the paint is so fresh it’s sticky to the touch; and in that Fan studio I was surrounded by actual original paintings, some hanging, a couple half finished on easels, some propped against the walls. From that night on, the mingled aroma of oil paint and turpentine, with its hint of mystery, its suggestion of activities unfolding outside the realm of normal expectations, has been an intoxicating perfume to me.

Furnished with three rickety wooden chairs and a stained sofa that had seen too much and forgotten too little, the studio’s main room, uncarpeted and spattered with paint of various hues, was the epicenter of the party. There, the motley-garbed guests -- not one in a military uniform or “conventional dress” à la W&L -- sipped beer and cheap red wine (marijuana would not infiltrate Richmond for another decade) while listening to an LP recording of a singer with a voice so wretched I thought it must be some kind of joke. (The singer’s name was Billie Holiday, and before my leave was up, having probably heard her a dozen more times, I was so completely crazy about her I’d purchased one of her albums, even though, like the shoplifter at W&L, I didn’t own a record player: for me, disorientation has all too often been the beginning of love.)

The party was only moderately noisy, although the buzz of otherwise serious conversation would periodically be interrupted by shouted non sequiturs, proclamations of a bizarre, surrealistic nature, followed by appreciative chuckling. Between the mad poetic outbursts, ideas were being tumbled like gemstones in a lapidary, discussion salted with names such as Freud, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Since in air force barracks guys talked mainly about cars, sports teams, and girlfriends -- in that order -- this dialogue was a refreshment to me, a tonic; and when I overheard Henry Miller mentioned, I jumped in with a few comments of my own.

Almost nobody else present had actually read Miller (the Grove Press paperback edition of
Tropic of Cancer
wouldn’t be published until 1961), and my firsthand observations made enough of an impression that when on the following evening, sans Peggy, I knocked on the studio door, I was recognized and admitted. Welcome to bohemia, Tommy Rotten.

I spent the last three weeks of my leave in that milieu, most particularly with the two painters who lived and worked in the studio I now visited daily, a larger-than-life pair named William Fletcher Jones and William Philip Kendrick, and with whom I would establish lasting friendships.

Jones looked like Dylan Thomas with a receding hairline and an exceeding waistline. A big brooding hulk, he would puff his jowls malevolently and bulge his hyperthyroid eyes until he resembled a hippopotamus rising from the ooze, then unfold his meaty lips to emit one of those nervous little nearly silent giggles with which certain jazz drummers vent their ecstasy at the terminus of an especially complicated riff. The giggles customarily followed some nonsensical -- obtuse, at any rate -- remark about life or art, though for Jones the line between the two was virtually nonexistent. He was to become rather well known for semiabstract cityscapes, charged with tension and electricity and executed in brilliant, juicy hues, although at the time he was painting courting lovers, realistic couples in every aspect except for their heads, which were featureless eggs.

As for Kendrick, whom his friends called “B.K.,” he was obsessed with the image of the dancer Nijinsky in the role of Petrouchka, the brokenhearted clown who for one shining moment sat upon the golden throne of God, a subject he has painted literally hundreds of times. B.K. was (and is) himself a clown, albeit a shy one: at odd moments he would jump up, click his heels together, and pirouette in a silly little dance, at the conclusion of which he would glance about the room with an anxious smile, like a child half expecting to be punished for inappropriate exuberance. Indeed, his round face almost perpetually exhibited the wide-eyed gaze and surprised smile of an astonished child, one who might have had his blindfold removed to find himself in a castle filled with ice cream, puppies, and toys.

B.K.’s sensitive baby face was all the more incongruous in that he was a state champion weight lifter, bulky muscles like hibernating armadillos concealed in the folds of his baggy duds. When ten years later we would move to New York together (I detoured to Richmond to pick him up on my way from Seattle), he would cadge drinks for us by walking the length of cocktail bars on his hands, somehow managing not to tip over any of the beverages resting thereupon. A one-hand stand on a bar stool was almost always good for a rum-and-Coke or a pint of Guinness, which we’d divide into two smaller glasses. It was in token repayment for this procurement that I partially dedicated my first novel to him in 1971.

At this writing, B.K. is well past eighty and we’ve been pals for more than half a century, a friendship that some may find a bit . . . well, bohemian; considering, as I eventually learned, that it was B.K. who had impregnated my wife when I was in Korea.

One morning when I was six, I awoke to find it spring. When I’d fallen asleep it was winter still, but sometime during the night, like a tipsy debutante sneaking home late from a ball, her hair undone, her green gown billowing, a song in her heart and a dreamy yet defiant smile on her face, spring had returned to Blowing Rock.

I’d been sick for nearly a week with the flu, and my mother, ever the nurse, thought I needed at least one more day in bed. Maybe, but when I saw through my bedroom window that the world outside had come alive, that it had taken on an insect quality, everywhere buzzing and budding, I wanted to claim a place in the sun. So, I opened the window (my room was on the first floor), jumped outside, and to Mother’s horror, went running, cavorting, and cartwheeling around and around the yard in my underwear.

For those high jinks, I paid with a scolding, a denial of promised ice cream, and an extra day in bed under observation to assure that my little escapade hadn’t brought on pneumonia. It was totally worth it.

My encounter with bohemia and the bohemians was to have a similar effect on me. Herb Gold, the late San Francisco author, wrote this: “In all the interstices of a society that still requires art, imagination, laziness, adventure, and possibility unwilled by family and employment, the bohemian unpacks his tender roots.” Is not Gold’s expression “tender roots” suggestive of spring?

From the stuffy sickroom of button-downed 1950s America, a vanilla-flavored, beige-draped decade whose lodestar was the pine-scented patio candle, I looked out on what appeared to be a kind of behavioral springtime -- a metaphoric season of irrepressible renewal; fertile and wild and green and free -- and felt an urge to go running around in it in my underwear. Alas, barely had its first robin chirped before my bohemian spring was replaced by regimental winter. Leave having expired, I now reported for duty to a base outside Omaha, Nebraska, where for the next twenty months I would work three stories underground in a theoretically nuclear bombproof building, a Cold War fortress without a single window to jump out of.

Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, is headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, whose mission during Cold War tensions was to be poised and prepared for Hot War every minute of every day. At all times, day and night, weekends and holidays (including the alleged birthday of “the Prince of Peace”) there were SAC bombers in the air, each freighting a payload of atom bombs, their crews awaiting the signal to proceed to a selected target and blow it into radioactive dust. Once the U.S. president had hung up the iconic red telephone, the next call, the order from Washington to let the hell begin, would be answered in the building where I worked.

There would be any number of potential targets blinking on the giant electric wall maps inside the SAC nerve center, and among the factors involved in determining which one or ones to actually bomb would be the prevailing flying conditions in the vicinity of each site. Pilots would need to know what the weather would be like in obscure corners of the Eastern Bloc, and it was up to my Special Weather Intelligence unit to supply them with the most recent information. If, for example, a cold front with heavy snow appeared to be moving in on a missile base near Cheboksary, reducing visibility, a strike might be diverted to a submarine station at Sevastopol, where winds were favorable and the ceiling high.

How would we know? Meteorological espionage. Clandestine ham-radio operators in inner Outer Mongolia or some Podunk part of Pskov would transmit -- in code -- the amount and type of cloud cover, wind speed and direction, temperature, dew point, barometric pressure, and ground-level visibility (how, or if, they were compensated for this secret and certainly dangerous work, nobody ever said) to us boys at Offutt; where we would then decode it, encrypt it in a code of our own, and plot the numbers and symbols with fountain pens onto paper maps. From that information, our forecasters would connect the dots to develop a pretty good picture of present and near-future atmospheric conditions throughout the Soviet Union and beyond. All that was missing was a jolly TV pitchman to advise the husbands of Nizhny Novgorod that “Tuesday might be a good day to dust off those golf clubs.”

Despite the high security and overtones of high drama (Dr. Strangelove would have felt right at home there), my work in Special Weather Intelligence was for the most part as routine as it was cloistered: as I’ve said, much of my time was spent in a bunker deep underground. An escape hatch, however, like bohemia itself, can be a state of mind, and in the midst of SAC’s ongoing dress rehearsals for nuclear war, surrounded by Nebraska’s ubiquitous feedlots and cornfields, there did exist opportunities to unpack one’s “tender roots.”

Back in Richmond during my leave, B.K. -- the painter–weight lifter–bashful clown -- had given me, offhandedly, an introductory course in art history. As we strolled the cobblestone alleys of the Fan District, drank beer at Eton’s on Grace Street, or leafed through coffee-table books and art magazines at his studio, B.K. prattled on and on about Rembrandt, Cézanne, Caravaggio, et al, seeming at times to be astounded that such men had actually existed. Though he particularly liked recounting gossip, probably fictionalized, about the artists’ personal lives, B.K. also had been able to explain to my satisfaction the differences between Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, and how the Impressionists were able to lead the viewer into mixing color in his or her own eye. Not long after arriving in Nebraska I discovered to my delight that Omaha’s Joslyn Museum was home to an impressive collection of everything from ancient Greek pottery to Renaissance masterworks (Titian, El Greco) to Impressionist gems by Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir.

After I had purchased my first car -- it cost fifty bucks, worth every nickel -- I took to spending free days wandering the Joslyn galleries, where, among other things, I tried to reconcile Renoir’s plump and rosy, wine-warmed wenches with the graceful if sinister beauty of the B-47 bombers nurtured and nourished at my air force base, eventually concluding that anything that says yes to life (a Renoir) is automatically saying no to war, regardless of how attractively its weapons and justifications may be packaged. Thus, like those bohemians with whom he was feeling a growing kinship, Airman Second Class Tommy Rotten woke up one morning to find himself once and for all a pacifist.

There was also music in Nebraska. Specifically, there was jazz, long the official sound track to all things bohemian in America, except for the years roughly between 1962 and 1980, when rock and roll ruled the waves. (Thelonious Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight” is modern bohemia’s national anthem.) More specifically, there was the incongruously named New York Jazz Workshop, an ensemble whose founding members each had at one time played with big-name jazzmen in Manhattan, so the name was not entirely presumptuous. Headquartered in Omaha, the New York Jazz Workshop (very contemporary, very cool) traveled all over the Midwest, playing mostly college venues, but every Sunday afternoon it held forth in Omaha’s Red Lion Lounge -- and every Sunday afternoon when I wasn’t down in the bowels of the earth, plotting weather maps, I was at the Red Lion at a table near the bandstand.