Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (17 page)

There was one other item on the table. Right in the center, a single medium-size chrysanthemum blossom of exceptional hue floated in a porcelain saucer. I recalled then that in Japan chrysanthemum flowers were not only eaten but considered a delicacy. I hesitated, but not for long. Snatching up the blossom, I plunged it in the dip and took a bite. Umm? Not bad. I repeated the process and was on my third chomp when I heard footsteps. The host was entering the room.

Instinctively, I hid the ragged remains of the blossom behind my back. The host gasped. “Where’s my mum?” he demanded of no one in particular. Perhaps he was appealing to angels on high. I shook my head and as I did so he noticed the several petals now clinging to my dip-smeared lips.

That chrysanthemum, I was soon to learn, had won first prize in the annual prestigious Richmond Flower Show that very afternoon: it was a blue ribbon champion of which the man was inordinately proud. The way he carried on, I might just as well have eaten his wife and kids.

I left without saying good-bye.

Although it was at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the Village Inn; at the opposite end, in fact, from just about any spectrum one might suggest, there was in the Fan another dispenser of liquid refreshment (or so it seemed) that sued for my attention. I dubbed the place “Il Palazzo della Contessa di Pepsi,” but it displayed no name outside or in, and was overall so nondescript that there were times when I doubted its existence.

It was the lone commercial establishment on a quiet, shady residential block a fair distance west of RPI and the Village, and thus largely unknown to both students and bohemians. Its clientele? I’m not certain who were its customers, if any, for while it appeared to be in business, it was so marginally so that its identity as a “commercial establishment” is subject to question. Occupying a storefront on the ground floor of an old town house, long since converted to rental apartments, there was, as I’ve indicated, neither signage nor any other reference to the merchandise for sale therein.

The proprietor of the store, my “contessa,” was an elderly woman, though not so elderly, so frail, or so obviously batty that I might blame dementia for the fact that she chose to sell nothing at all except Pepsi-Cola. And the bottles of Pepsi, of which there were a great number, weren’t even refrigerated. This was not a place where on a sultry Richmond day you could pop in for a cold pop. Yet cases and six-packs of Pepsi, stacked high and frosted only with dust, lined the walls on either side, while individual bottles (never a can) marked time on shelves behind the equally dusty counter.

Adding to the intrigue were the shop’s hours. The contessa (the sobriquet was mildly sarcastic, for she was plain in dress and demeanor) elected -- for reasons I assume known to her alone -- to open her doors from 10:17 to 11:53 in the morning, 2:36 to 4:41 in the afternoon. I may not have the numbers precisely correct, but you get the idea. The hours were odd. Very odd. And they were strict. You couldn’t show up at, say, 4:42
P.M.
and expect to gain admittance let alone a warm cola.

That I never asked the old lady to explain her strange hours or her singular choice of merchandise was due primarily to my reluctance to dispel the mystery. Einstein equated the mysterious with the beautiful, and while the nameless and dingy little Pepsi outlet did not exactly embody an exquisite equation addressing relativity or the secret origins of the universe, it did direct one’s attention to both the mysterious, ambiguous nature of “time” and our heavy-handed and somewhat arbitrary efforts to force logical order upon it. If the shop’s contents were monotonous, were static, its uneven, seemingly illogical hours of accessibility (which were subject to change without notice) had a way of mocking our notions of both harmony and permanence. The store seemed simultaneously fixed and boundless: it silently accentuated the conflict between measured time and the unaccountable infinite.

Okay, okay. Admittedly, I’d been reading the Surrealists that year and also had recently fallen rather madly in love with the avant-gardists of la belle époque, so it’s probably not wholly exceptional that I would take satisfaction in the manner in which the dusty little Pepsi store seemed to quietly push back the frontiers of logical reality -- which may explain why, whenever I passed the place on foot or in a vehicle, the words that would come unbidden to mind were those of the poets laureate of the subconscious, the radical bards of the imaginative absolute. And why, for years thereafter, when friends asked why I always ordered a Pepsi instead of a Coke, I tended to smile nostalgically and quote André Breton: “I prefer red like the egg when it is green.”

People rarely asked me twice.

19

love it & leave it

If charm were a bathtub, Richmond could have floated a hundred rubber duckies and still had room for half the Royal Navy. With its antebellum architecture, its broad boulevards (a noted European critic once wrote that Richmond’s Monument Avenue was “the most beautiful street in America”); with its heroic statues, its blossoms, its birds, its boughs, its high-tea manners and grits-and-sorghum hospitality; with its cautiously frisky, intoxicating springs; and its horsey, gilt-edged falls, Richmond was a study in slowly barbecued, lightly salted grace. Ah, but a big front has a big back, and Richmond had a dark side wider and muddier than the James River that cuts through the city with a bourbon track.

Never mind the annual Tobacco Festival that marshaled lavish floats, dozens of marching bands, and a court of competing beauty queens to celebrate -- yes, celebrate! -- a smelly, highly addictive substance responsible for millions of deaths the world over. And never mind the Civil War Centennial, a fête that was to last precisely as long as the horrific conflict itself, and that would make no effort to conceal -- nor spare any expense to demonstrate -- Richmond’s pride in having served as the capital of the Confederacy during the most shameful period of America’s history. I’m inclined to set aside those commemorations, and the bloody war and the killer weed that inspired them, to focus on a livelier, more persistent skeleton clacking its bones in Richmond’s charming closet.

There are historians who will point out that some good did result from the Civil War (abolition of slavery for example); and apologists who laud with some justification tobacco’s prominent role in the economic rise of our young nation. There can be no plea, however, on behalf of racism, no defense that isn’t as evil as the attitudes and policies of racism itself. And here let me emphasize that I bring up the subject not to jab a stick in Richmond’s once-blind eye, an orb that while still not 20/20 perhaps, can nowadays distinguish a fellow human being from an inferior subspecies and behave accordingly; but, rather, because Richmond’s racism colors (if that’s not a poor choice of verbs) the two wiggy but consequential stories I wish next to tell.

On my writing room wall there hangs a poster so faded and worn it might have once hung in the men’s toilet at the Crazy Horse Saloon. It depicts a caricature of a horned beast and reads like this:
The Rhinoceros Coffee House Presents Tom Robbins / Poetry Reading & Lectures on Alley Culture / Set to Jazz (Paul Miller’s Primitive Four) / 18 Jan. 1961 / 9:00 / 538 Harrison.
I’m unsure why that old poster has remained in my possession all these years when I’ve lost so many other doubtlessly more valuable souvenirs and mementos along the way. Yet here it hangs, and from it hangs a tale.

The Rhinoceros was opened a half block from the Village Inn by a couple of acquaintances cashing in -- though God knows it made precious little money -- on the beatnik coffeehouse fad that had begun a few years earlier in San Francisco. Well, you couldn’t have a real beatnik coffeehouse without beatnik poets, and since Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were permanently occupied elsewhere, I volunteered to substitute, hastily composing a sheaf of poetic rants specifically for the occasion. (As that editor at the
New Yorker
would attest, I would have had to be as mad as an outhouse rat to fancy myself a true poet.)

While in the course of my reading I confessed my love of the city, I also employed twenty-three shades of satire and twenty-four of hyperbole to box Richmond’s pretty pink ears, box it for its Tobacco Festival, its upcoming Civil War Centennial, its affected anglophilia, and, most resoundingly, its racism. Amateurish though my poems surely were, my metaphors were inventive, my imagery outlandish and funny, and those in the small audience seemed receptive enough -- with one notable exception. In the middle of one of my rampaging verses, a young woman got up and stalked out, not unobtrusively, mind you: she was in a huff and made certain everyone knew it.

I recognized the woman, I’d seen her in the Village a time or two, although we’d never met. She was difficult to ignore, frankly, being tall, blond, shapely, and as creamy as a hot vanilla sundae. Her name was Susan Bush (no relation to that nefarious gang down in Texas), and she resided not in the helter-skelter Fan but the formal West End, the daughter of one of those aristocratic old Virginia families that had lost its wealth but not its conceits. She worked for a brokerage firm and her friends (and presumably her lovers) were stockbrokers, bankers, and lawyers; all very Episcopalian and unwilling to let you forget that their colonial ancestors had settled Jamestown and established grand plantations while yours were digging potatoes behind some thatched-roof hovel in the old country.

When she dropped into the Village, regulars believed Susan to be slumming, and to a certain extent that was true, but nobody much minded because she was affable, respectful, could hold her alcohol, and, as no male with sufficient testosterone to sprout a single whisker would have failed to notice, beautiful.

Nine months passed before I saw Susan again. It was an unseasonably warm day in October and I’d gone down to the financial district to argue with my landlords. In Richmond, it was rare to rent an apartment from an on-site owner, a tenant almost always had to go through a rental agency, usually part of a large real estate firm and not given to taking the tenant’s side in any dispute. Whatever our disagreement, my meeting with the landlords had not gone in my favor that day. Overheated by both the dialogue and the weather, I ducked into the closest grill and ordered a beer. I was standing at the bar trying to lower my temperature with a frosty Pabst Blue Ribbon when who should walk in, having just gotten off work nearby, but Susan Bush. I don’t know if she recognized me at first, but within seconds, perhaps by chance, she was right next to me at the bar. We faced one another. She graced me with about 70 percent of a smile. And I proceeded to let her have it.

I mean I really lit into her. I told her that her dramatic exit from the Rhinoceros was not merely rude, not simply crass, but indicative of a level of insensitivity exceeded only by her shallowness and ignorance. I informed her that had she the intellectual wherewithal to distinguish shit from Shinola, she would have realized that I only criticized Richmond because the place was important to me. “Why would I have gone to all that trouble,” I asked, “to illuminate Richmond’s faults if I didn’t love the city and desperately yearn for it to conduct itself in a more enlightened manner?”

Finally, having exhausted my allotment of bile, I stepped back and took a long slow draft of beer. Susan just stood there. She stood there silently, looking at me with considerable focus and intensity, staring as if she were trying to memorize and catalog every pore in the face of someone who had just called her a clueless philistine. Then, after at least a full minute, she revived her 70 percent yet somehow now more creamy smile, and asked softly, intently, without a squib of sarcasm or trace of tease, “Will you marry me?”

I may have been stunned, but I wasn’t totally speechless. “Yes,” I said.

And the next day, we drove to North Carolina, where there was no waiting period for a license, and were married there.

Lest the reader judge me madder than that outhouse rat’s hallucinating aunt (the old garbage-dump rat who thinks she’s Minnie Mouse), let me hasten to supply a bit of backstory.

For nearly a year, I’d been dating an RPI art student named Lynda Pleet. Lynda was smart, confident, a talented painter, and movie-star gorgeous. She also resided in a women’s dormitory and she was Jewish, two conditions that conspired to keep us apart.

Her dorm imposed a strict 10
P.M.
curfew on its residents. It was boosted to eleven on Fridays and Saturdays but that extra hour was irrelevant since I worked until midnight except on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and Lynda had a studio class until 9
P.M.
on Tuesdays. Essentially, we had a Wednesday kind of love. Sure, we could see one another on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but these were not exactly hours suited to romance; and it was as much the result of our conflicting schedules as the moral temper of the 1950s that physically our relationship hadn’t progressed beyond heavy petting in the front seat of my recently purchased Plymouth Valiant.

Lynda’s parents had thought I was cool -- until they learned we were serious about one another, at which point, not fancying a goy in their woodpile, they pressured her to start seeing nice Jewish boys. She eventually settled on one, and though she contended that he was but a beard, a decoy, a front, the guy -- having a more conventional schedule than my own -- was soon seeing more of her than I was.

Somehow Lynda had injured her knee, and during the period between the end of spring semester and the beginning of summer school, when RPI was closed for two weeks, she entered the Medical College of Virginia to have the leg surgically repaired. In those days, hospitals maintained very strict visiting hours, and since her family and/or her substitute boyfriend were always in her room during the allotted time for visitation, it sorely tested my ingenuity to find a way to see her there. As fortune would have it, however, a friend of B.K.’s was an intern at MCV, and we convinced him to loan me his white coat and stethoscope for a few hours.

Late that evening I drove to MCV, ducked into a lobby restroom, removed the coat from my shopping bag and put it on. It proved about two sizes too large, but
c’est la vie:
the mission was a go. I hung the stethoscope around my neck and walked nonchalantly to the elevator. Several people were in the elevator but, luckily, they appeared to be mere staffers: maintenance men, dietitians, lab technicians, and the like. Nevertheless, I averted my eyes, staring at the floor as if contemplating an emergency colonoscopy I’d been summoned to perform.

I got off -- alone -- on the fourth floor and set out at a brisk pace for Lynda’s private room, where we might anticipate some hours of quality time together in an intimate setting. And, hey, the fact that I was quite literally “playing doctor” served to invoke enough intriguing possibilities (
Grey’s Anatomy
meets the
Kama Sutra
) to propel me ever faster down that long, empty corridor.

Just before I reached Lynda’s door, alas, a nurse came around the corner: a uniformed, middle-aged, stern-faced nurse. Her comfortable white shoes practically screeched to a halt. Why was she blocking my passage? Why was she staring me up and down? Maybe it was the baggy coat, so ill-fitting it suggested a horse blanket draped over a poodle. Or maybe it was the fact that at twenty-eight going on twenty-nine, I still looked about nineteen.

In any case, I concluded that an imminent discussion of my medical credentials was likely not in my best interest. The entrance to a stairwell happened to be but a few yards to my left, and propelled now by panic, I dashed for it and ran down three flights, removing my coat as I fled, although the stethoscope was still swinging wildly from my neck like a mutant Nagasaki whip snake when I barged panting into the lobby. Miraculously, I managed to get out of the hospital before an alarm could sound.

I relate this story not to embarrass Lynda Pleet or whatever nice (and lucky) Jewish boy she may have wed in my stead, but rather to convey the state of my frustration -- the depth, breadth, and length of it -- on that fateful day when I ran into Susan Bush at the financial district watering hole. The fact that I answered in the affirmative when a virtual stranger, a woman to whom I’d never been introduced, proposed marriage to me is both an indication of the size of that frustration and an illustration in action of two basic philosophical principles that came to guide my life.

(1) When a situation has become too frustrating, a quandary too persistently insolvable; when dealing with the issue is generating chronic discontent, infringing on freedom, and inhibiting growth, it may be time to quit beating one’s head against the wall, reach for a big fat stick of metaphoric dynamite, light the fuse, and blast the whole unhappy business nine miles past oblivion.

(2) After making an extreme effort, after pulling out all the stops, one is still unable to score Tibetan peach pie, take it as a signal to relax, grin, pick up a fork, and go for a slice of the apple.

Anyway, when the smoke cleared, when the ash settled, when the pie plate was washed and put away, Lynda seemed as relieved as I that our personal production of
Romeo and Juliet
had closed its run, though she might have preferred a more conventional ending (minus, of course, the double suicide).

Returning to the matter of racism, I should confess that I have had little or no interest in race per se. My activities on behalf of civil rights were motivated less by a blanket admiration for darkly pigmented peoples than by an innate hatred of injustice. Whenever groups or individuals are subjected to hurtful unfairness, my stomach tends to roil and my blood to boil in reaction. Suffice to say there was a considerable amount of roiling and boiling going on in my corporeal being as I interacted with the South in general and Virginia in particular, 1957–1962, but it was a goofy integrationist accident rather than an overt act of protest that set into motion the events that made inevitable my departure from Richmond as the cannon boom of Civil War enactments echoed all around me.

In most respects, the
Times-Dispatch
was an excellent newspaper, which is to say its writing and editing adhered to the highest journalistic standards, and this despite the fact that the large dictionary that sat atop a pedestal in the center of the newsroom, serving reporters and copy editors alike, was so out-of-date it defined uranium as “a worthless mineral.” Editorially, the
T-D
was likewise antiquated in the sense that it reflected the long-standing temperament and ideology of its statewide readership, an audience so conservative it considered Unitarians a satanic cult and the consumption of Russian dressing an act of treason. On its editorial page the
T-D
was an outspoken advocate of “separate but equal” rights, a gloss for “let the black bastards get their own damn buses”; while in its news columns no African American was ever mentioned by name unless he or she had committed an offense, and even then, no matter how sensational or newsworthy the crime, photographs of the colored perpetrator never seemed to make it into the paper.