Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (15 page)

It was my disorienting relationship with Billie Holiday (first mocking, then adoring) that had yanked me through jazz’s swinging door (another boon from that transformative leave in Richmond), and by my second year in Omaha, I’d become so immersed in the medium -- in its audacious bending of notes, yo-yoing of pitches, and rainbowing of rhythms as it determinedly explored new ways to play and hear music -- that I naively presumed myself qualified to write something about it. When word reached me that the New York Jazz Workshop was in the process of recording an album, I sat at the little government-issue desk in my barracks and penned what I presumed to be liner notes.

The next Sunday, at the Red Lion, I handed the pages to the group’s ostensible leader. Apparently, he perused my notes, and favorably so, during intermission because after the break he read aloud what I’d written, verbatim, over the bandstand microphone. The audience applauded. The musicians applauded. The jazzmen I’d been applauding every Sunday for a year or more were now applauding
me
. It’s hard to describe the elation I felt. Vaulted to a peak of pleasure, my heart took a drum solo worthy of Joe Morello.

Several years passed before it dawned on me that they were applauding my use of language, itself rather audacious, rather than my woefully inadequate knowledge of jazz. Nevertheless, that experience was a pivot point for me. After a lengthy absence, I began to write again, and shortly before leaving Offutt and the military, I entered and won another air force short-story contest. This story concerned a man who first psychologically and then physically turns into a mosquito. A month or so later, I submitted it to
Weird Tales
magazine -- and received my first ever rejection slip.

Incidentally, I’ve been fortunate enough to garner only one other rejection notice in my literary careen (a term I prefer to “career”). It arrived the following year in response to a poem I’d submitted to the
New Yorker
. As I recall, the poem went something like this:

At the bat of your lashes peacocks preen.

Peacocks preen, elephants remember,

camels go for days without water,

and dinosaurs of all types become extinct.

Although I’ve never pretended to be a poet, I’m still on the fence about whether or not the
New Yorker
poetry editor made the right decision.

My first car, that fifty-dollar hummer, was a 1947 Kaiser. A what? Yeah, a Kaiser, a six-cylinder folly (mine seemed to hit on no more than three) manufactured near Detroit between 1945 and 1953. It looked like the illegitimate child of a sperm whale and a pizza oven, and was built so low to the ground you actually had to step down to get into it: it was not unlike entering a sunken living room or boarding one of those Tunnel of Love boats at an amusement park.

At the time, I was dating a cute little WAF, and when I say “little” I’m not being colloquial: measuring just four feet eleven inches, it’s surprising Bunnie was allowed in the air force. When she sat beside me in that low-riding Kaiser nobody could tell she was in the car. From outside, you couldn’t even see the top of her head. As a consequence, rumor spread through my squadron that “Robbins drives around all over Omaha yakking to himself.” It’s fortunate, I guess, that they were unaware of my history with the talking stick.

If that rumor contributed to the fact that I was the only airman in my unit not to receive a reenlistment lecture, I couldn’t say. There were, however, reasons why my extended military service went unsolicited. I was good at my job, always arrived on time, and despite a couple of citations for refusing to wear a hat (I felt like a Tijuana bus driver in those low-class lids), I presented a clean, neat, pleasant countenance to my comrades and superiors. True, but a cheerful, generally compliant disposition apparently could not disguise the irrepressible bohemian vapors that now wafted from the pits of my flesh, effluvia interpreted by some as passive insubordination and others as covert anti-authoritarianism. It didn’t help matters that names such as Freud, Picasso, and Stravinsky were occasionally popping up in my conversation. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t American. It wasn’t
right
.

Charges of “intellectual snobbery” escalated after I innocently asked a sergeant which he considered worse, conspicuous consumption or conspicuous nonconsumption. (I’d been reading Margaret Mead.) From the way the guy waxed livid with hostility, one would have thought I’d inquired if he believed Uncle Sam was a lesbian.

On the other hand, I may not have received a reenlistment sales pitch because it was so obviously a waste of time, and never mind that the prospect of wasting time has rarely if ever stopped anybody in the military. At any rate, the air force awarded me an honorable discharge (poor compensation for the fact that I’d received only two promotions in four years); I shipped my belongings to my parents’ address, sold the Kaiser to a junkyard for fifteen bucks, shook hands with my buddies, kissed the little WAF good-bye, and hitchhiked back to Richmond, perhaps passing on the road Neal Cassady or Jack Kerouac, an exciting and soon-to-be-famous new breed of bohemians.

If I, indeed, crossed paths with representatives of the Beat Generation while thumbing from Nebraska to Virginia, I failed to recognize them as such. I did, however, encounter an old gentleman whom the Beats might well have found worthy of praise.

On a chilly morning (despite it being early June) in eastern Kentucky, I was stranded on the outskirts of a small city, stranded because it was Saturday and all the traffic was heading
into
town so that the coal miners, moonshiners, hardscrabble farmers and their families could attend to their Saturday shopping (a weekly ritual), while I was heading in the opposite direction. Pickup after pickup passed me by, the cab of each one crowded past the point of legality with parents, grandparents, and perhaps other kin; the truck beds full of children, bundled against the fresh mountain air. More often than not, drivers honked at me and their children waved. Occasionally, one of the kids would shout, “Hey, soldier boy!” Although I was officially now a civilian, I was wearing my uniform because it helped in getting rides.

The friendly reception warmed my heart -- these were in a sense my people -- but the rest of me was becoming chilled to the marrow. Eventually, I turned on a numb heel and took temporary refuge in an unpainted old general store a short way down the road. General stores, all but extinct now, differed from today’s convenience stores in that they stocked considerably less junk food, considerably more household staples. This one in Kentucky sold everything from sacks of potatoes to gallons of kerosene, from flour and school notebooks to mousetraps and sugar. I bought a Milky Way candy bar and was eating it beside the potbellied stove when the aforementioned elderly gentleman walked in.

If central casting had been searching for a man to play opposite Granny Robbins, this was their guy. Tall, lean, stubble-faced, and gray, he was clad in faded bib overalls and actually carried a squirrel rifle. He was chewing a “chaw of ’backy,” and, as he possessed a deficit of teeth, tobacco juice dribbled in brown rivulets down his chin. When he shuffled up to the counter, the clerk smiled hospitably, and asked, “How are you today, Uncle Ben?” Whereupon Uncle Ben replied, “ ’Bout dead, thank ye.”

There was not a spot of self-pity in his answer, not a hint of despair, and while there was a detectable twinkle in his eye, it was the glow of equanimity not the glint of irony. Throughout the history of Zen, there’s been an emphasis on the impermanent nature of all life, all things, and though I surely don’t wish to portray Uncle Ben as some kind of camouflaged Zen master, there was in his tone and his being a good-natured, slightly amused acceptance of inevitable impermanence.

It was the briefest of moments and more than five decades have passed, yet I’ve obviously never forgotten Uncle Ben because when I’m laid up with the flu or some other affliction and a friend calls to ask how I am, I automatically answer, with an appropriate twang, “ ’Bout dead, thank ye.” It never fails to make me feel better.

18

fan man

Few readers will have heard of Richmond Professional Institute. Even before RPI locked arms with the Medical College of Virginia in 1968 to become the vastly larger, more comprehensive Virginia Commonwealth University, it wasn’t widely known, though it was Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the Sorbonne rolled into one for aspiring artists in the southeastern U.S.; and in many ways it was the ideal school for incipient bohemians looking for a friendly academic environment in which to unpack those tender roots.

First of all, it was an urban college, its campus brick, stone, and asphalt; nary a blade of grass to remind a student of suburbia, small-town repression, or cornball life back on the farm. Most of its classes were taught (many still are) in former private homes, grand old three-story houses resplendent with ornate staircases, cupolas, balconies, and bay windows convenient for checking to see if the Yankees were coming. Secondly, it was a professional school, which is to say there were no required courses in English, math, or a foreign language. From day one a freshman was immersed in his or her chosen field -- and frequently that field was art, drama, or music. Degrees were offered in advertising and retailing, in journalism and fashion design, and its department of social work had a wide reputation, but it was its curriculum in the arts that gave RPI its flavor, a flavor unsuited to everyone’s palate in Richmond, one of the most proper, conservative cities in America.

RPI did not field a football team, not a single fraternity or sorority Greeked up the place, and it should go without saying that there was no dress code: “conventional dress” at RPI meant whatever the alley cat dragged in, and the
La Bohème
chic on display invited the city’s gentry and good ol’ boys alike to deride the school as a haven for degenerates of every persuasion. That characterization, as exaggerated as it was, only made the place dearer to the hearts of many students, for little encourages a bohemian more than to be misunderstood and maligned by squares. RPI had suited William Fletcher Jones and B.K., both alumni, and it was to suit me, as well, when I enrolled there soon after leaving the air force.

RPI’s student newspaper was called the
Proscript,
and I never knew what that meant either, although the name somehow made more sense than the
Ring-tum Phi
. In any case, I became editor in chief of the
Proscript,
and wrote a weekly column I entitled
Walks on the Wild Side
as a kind of tribute to Nelson Algren, arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. Like each and every Virginia school, private or public, RPI, for all of its air of nonconformity, was racially segregated. As protest, I and two of my fellow staffers on the
Proscript,
Pat Thomas and Ginger Foxwell, went to great lengths to sneak integrationist messages into the paper, and while some of them were so clever as to be almost entirely esoteric, we were nearly always caught.

As a result of this subversion, I was reprimanded with a C in journalism, which though it torpedoed my “straight A” average, didn’t ruin my chances in the job market. In fact, for most of my senior year I worked a full forty-hour week on the sports desk of the
Richmond
Times-Dispatch,
the state’s leading daily paper. Like all morning papers, the
Times-Dispatch
was produced at night. I worked from four in the afternoon until midnight, which is how I managed to carry an eighteen-hour class load despite full employment. It was a bit of a strain, however, and I was as happy as any kid in junior high when the school year finally ended.

Commencement exercises at RPI were slated for 10
A.M.
, and due to my schedule, I was of a mind to skip the ceremony, reasoning that I could profit more from sleep than walking across a stage for a perfunctory handshake and a parchment diploma. My pal Ginger Foxwell objected. She wanted like-minded company at the event. And when I claimed that I simply wouldn’t wake up in time to dress and make it to the civic auditorium (whose name, believe it or not, was the Mosque), she countered that she would send a friend by my apartment to rouse me and drive me to commencement. Sure enough, at nine-fifteen or thereabouts on the fateful day, there was a rapping, a tapping at my chamber door, and though Edgar Allan Poe had once called Richmond home, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a raven. Indeed, the figure my bleary eye saw through the peephole was a bird of quite a different feather.

Patricia was radical Ginger’s unlikely best friend, a married woman from suburbia. I’d met -- and been beguiled by -- her a month earlier when, after accepting a ride home from a party (I’d yet to replace the Kaiser), I’d ended up in the backseat beside her as the driver took his passengers on an inebriated joyride up and down the streets of the Fan. Patricia and I had chatted jovially, perhaps to conceal nervousness at the insane way the driver was taking corners, and when the car finally squealed to a stop at my address, we’d impulsively, unexpectedly kissed. It was intended to be casual, just a sociable good-night buss -- but then the world might be a different place had Madame Curie discovered a new method for making cheese fondue rather than a recipe for radioactivity.

At the meeting of our lips, peacocks went into hiding, elephants suffered memory loss, camels developed a maddening thirst, and dinosaurs long thought to be extinct turned up on the evening news.

It could not have lasted for more than four or five seconds, yet this commingling of mouth meat, this musical clink of enamel against enamel, this slippery friction (for some reason always as startling as it is intimate) that occurs when tongues collide (surprise!) was epic, mythic, even biblical in its scope. A person could imagine seas parting, bushes burning, angels hovering, milk and honey flowing from a stone; imagine wheeling chariots, strikes of ancient lightning, and the lamb lying down with the lion in a field of crimson poppies. Those kissing such a kiss, transformed momentarily into a hairy god and a naked nymph slurping nectar from the same full cup, could imagine it lasting forty days and forty nights, though as indicated, it was over so quickly that the parties kissing could not be wholly certain it ever happened.

Now, weeks later, here Patricia stood in my doorway, dolled up in her go-to-commencement finery and wearing a smile that managed to be simultaneously timid, awkward, and seductive. In the time that elapsed as we stared at one another there, I could have received a half-dozen diplomas, a haircut, and a citation for loitering. Then, our heads bobbed toward one another, back and forth, like wary pigeons pecking at an ear of corn, until after a couple of near misses we connected and kissed for the second time that spring.

Patricia had married at sixteen, and now at twenty-two had three lovely children and a nice home in a lower-middle-class suburb. She also had a hole somewhere inside, down which a significant, formative, irreplaceable chunk of her young life had gone missing. Of course, in retrospect, that sounds like I’m making excuses for her. As for my own part in this, I must confess that when Moses threw that stone tablet at me -- the one in which the Seventh Commandment had been plainly etched -- I ducked and it sailed out the window.

Oh, I felt pangs of guilt all right, but I’d recently taken to reading Zen texts and while reading Zen is akin to reading swimming (in both cases one must eventually toss aside books and just leap off the dock), I was learning the wisdom of living in the moment. Moreover, in my moment of wavering hesitation, I could hear ol’ Billy Blake shouting all the way from the eighteenth century, “Kiss the joy as it flies.”

Suffice to say, I never made it to my college commencement. Due to graduate with honors, I chose dishonor instead, earning a postgraduate degree in adultery.
Summa cum lotta
.

The “Fan” in Fan District refers neither to the manufacture of those rotary appliances used to circulate air in enclosed architectural spaces nor to the handheld accessories whose primary function it is to cool down, and conceal the facial twitches of, overheated dowagers. Rather, it’s named for the way streets fan out in a radiating semicircle from Monroe Park, a green if soot-peppered oasis in the urban center of Richmond. It’s an old neighborhood in, by American standards, an old city, though one sumptuous with block after block of beautifully restored town houses, and enlivened by the student population of Virginia Commonwealth University (formerly RPI), along with the sort of shops and watering holes that cater to students; as well as to the artists, gays, and bohemians who have both enriched and stigmatized the area for decades.

When I think of the Fan, which I seem to persist in doing, I think primarily of its alleys. As charming as are its leafy streets, lined with renovated homes and almost audibly tramped by the ghost boots of long-dead Confederate officers, it is the alleyways dividing those streets that are responsible for the romance in my Richmond reveries. The images and moods most associated with the word “alley” -- narrow, secluded, gritty, generally unlit, and often dangerous passageways populated by emaciated tomcats, garbage trucks, and thugs -- do not entirely apply to the alleys of the Fan, which to this day are simultaneously inviting and forbidding, elegant and squalid, ominous and suffused with grace.

What one notices first about alleys in the Fan is that they’re cobblestoned, an antiquated method of paving that grants them a quaint old European quality -- and when moonlit, an illusion of being studded with golden marshmallows (giving rise to thoughts of sweet-potato pudding -- or Oz). Next, if the season is right, one is likely to discover how sensuous, coquettish even, an alley can be, for these Fan alleys are lined with fragrant honeysuckle, climbing roses, dogwood, lush magnolia, and showy va-va-vooms of violet wisteria: sufficient allure to distract the eye from rubbish cans and the nose from spots recently favored for baptism by urine.

Further, what makes the Fan alleys unusual if not unique are the little two-story carriage houses one passes every twenty yards or so along one’s route. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gentry kept their buggies and horses on the ground floors of these adjunct buildings, while the upper floors were living quarters for servants. Nowadays, the ground floors typically garage bicycles and sports cars, while those above are rented out as studios for painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians.

The alleys become all the more interesting after nightfall, when they softly resonate with stray disembodied fragments of music (live or recorded), intellectual discourse, dog-bark, couple-squabble, and woo-pitch, not to mention the even less tangible secrets that seem to seep from the shadowed crannies, the walled gardens, and the back bedrooms of the decorous houses that face city streets with feigned nonchalance, as if oblivious of, or at least indifferent to, the eccentric little rivers of alley life -- incongruously cultured, intermittently raw, and potentially threatening -- that course stealthily behind them.

On many a hot, sticky summer night, when a restless Richmond felt like the interior of a napalmed watermelon, I’d leave work at midnight and walk the alleys of the Fan until dawn, half expecting Patricia’s armed husband to leap out at me from every spooky nook. On my nights off (Tuesdays and Wednesdays), I’d hang out at Eton’s, playing Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of “But Not for Me” (my God, what an elegantly poignant tour de force!: it makes self-pity sound like a refined condition, makes the lovelorn feel like a noble tragic hero rather than a poor dejected sap), over and over on the jukebox until closing time (also midnight); then commence my cobblestone ramble, occasionally with fellow alley enthusiasts for company.

At some point in late 1959, Eton’s abruptly fell out of favor (maybe it had just become too fashionable) and the hip scene (except for the gay boys) moved almost en masse diagonally across Grace Street to the Village Inn, a funkier joint run by amiable Greeks who made fine submarine sandwiches and had never heard of Ella Fitzgerald. (The Village also had a jukebox, of course, but the record selection, lacking the advantages of superior gay taste, was less sophisticated, its amplification poor, and it quietly starved to death for lack of quarters.) My friend B.K. was now renting studio space atop a carriage house in the alley directly behind the Village, and it was in that studio that “the Baboon Family” gave its one and only, though locally legendary, performance.

It was on a Wednesday evening in 1961 that B.K., his diminutive powder keg of a girlfriend, Mary Lou Davis, and I were moping around in his studio, bored, broke, and feeling in sore need of alcoholic stimulation. It wasn’t long before the solution became obvious. We stripped naked, painted our buttocks liberally with red acrylic, and climbed up in the carriage house’s large wooden rafters -- after first having torn pages from B.K.’s sketchbook to make hasty flyers (
See the Baboon Family, 10 o’clock, Admission 25 Cents
), which we persuaded a passerby, a good-natured acquaintance, to distribute in the Village.

Word spread. By ten-fifteen a sizable crowd had climbed the outside stairs to gawk at the red-assed “baboons” who, gibbering, grunting, and scratching themselves, were cavorting among the exposed beams overhead. The problem next became how to get people to leave. It’s tiring being a faux baboon.

After an almost excruciatingly long time, however, the novelty (I hesitate to say “excitement”) wore off. Spectators, many muttering and shaking their heads, filtered back to their booths, bar stools, and beers; and B.K., Mary Lou, and I descended, finding more quarters in our admission jar than the Village jukebox swallowed in an average month. After washing off our bumptaratums and getting dressed, we were able to go buy a bottle of cheap champagne, which we sipped in a celebratory mood, like actors toasting their success after opening night of a hit Broadway show.

Maybe it’s not unusual that a struggling artist and an aspiring writer who’d yet to find his literary voice would paint their butts red and cavort nude in public, but why, you might wonder, would a nice young Southern girl participate in such a shameless display? Well, you would have had to have known Mary Lou Davis (aka the Human Wrecking Ball) -- and had you lived in the Fan District in the last half of the twentieth century, you very well might have known her.