Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (18 page)

On the
T-D
’s copy desk where I worked, my liberal sentiments were well known, earning me the cute nickname of “Nigger Lover.” This epithet, however, was never vitriolic or hurled in disgust or anger. My coworkers, a sharp-witted, sharp-tongued, crusty crew of grammar guards, were just genuinely puzzled as to how an educated, clean-cut, Southern white boy (whose exploits in the Fan amused and titillated them) could have formed such heretical, unnatural opinions, and they chided me for my misguided views in an easygoing, jocular manner.

Their pet name might have been spoken with a drop more venom had they known that on Tuesday nights in 1961 I attended biracial meetings in the Unitarian church on Grove Avenue, and occasionally joined the group when, at some physical risk, it ventured into King William County to teach clandestine classes to African-American pupils. Rather than obey a federal order to integrate, King William had shut down all of its public schools, black and white. White kids were being tutored in “private schools” that met in church basements (Praise blue-eyed Jesus!), so our group was striving to provide a similar educational service at a black church out in the tick-infested sticks between the hamster-size hamlets of King William and Aylett. The subject I volunteered to teach was geography, it having been of keen interest to me ever since I acquired that world atlas at age seven, but for which these black kids had no more regard than did their Caucasian counterparts, which was approximately the same regard in which they might hold a fat fly sunbathing on a horse turd.

At any rate, my newspaper colleagues knew nothing of my Tuesday subversion (Wednesdays were reserved for Lynda Pleet). I respected and enjoyed them despite their prejudices, and I liked the work, especially writing headlines, a word game of sorts that vaguely resembles playing Scrabble. One of my nightly duties on the copy desk was to edit the Earl Wilson syndicated celebrity gossip column. Wilson was based in New York and his column,
It Happened Last Night,
consisted of tidbits, meant to be provocative or revealing, about Broadway and Hollywood stars, especially those Wilson or his secret agents would observe misbehaving or celebrating some new deal at Manhattan nightclubs. Part of my job was to select a photo of a mentioned celebrity, which could be inserted into each column.

Well, one night Wilson happened to mention the great Louis Armstrong for one reason or another, and without a second thought I went into our “morgue,” selected a suitable picture of Mr. Armstrong from the photo files, had our staff artist reduce it to the proper size, and stuck it in Wilson’s column. I went to sleep that night as sweetly innocent as a newborn turtle.

I was still in my little shell when, reporting for work the next afternoon, I was summoned to the managing editor’s office, an unexpected invitation I could not easily refuse. It turned out, on the surface at least, to be a cordial meeting. John H. Colburn held up the page of the paper on which Armstrong’s beaming face appeared. He confided that there had been a lot of grumbling from readers about the picture. I expressed genuine surprise -- didn’t
everybody,
except maybe the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, love ol’ Satchmo? -- and Mr. Colburn smiled and sent me back to the copy desk, apparently writing it off as an honest mistake.

On the copy desk I was regarded as the resident Asian expert, due to my interest in that region. There was major fighting in Laos at the time and the
T-D
had been giving it front-page coverage, but the editors were starting to have second thoughts about that level of attention, so I was assigned to telephone Richmond residents at random and ask the question “Do you know where Laos is?” Few did. My favorite response was, “He don’t live here. Try across the street.” The survey should have been both entertaining and disheartening to a geography buff, but all the while, in the cellar of my cerebellum, I was continuing to stew over the Louie Armstrong incident. A couple of weeks later, Earl Wilson mentioned a black woman -- I believe it was Pearl Bailey -- and I decided to test the waters.

It was on a Monday that I inserted the picture of Pearl into Wilson’s column. Returning to work Thursday afternoon, I’d scarcely hung up my coat and loosened my tie before I was again summoned to the boss’s office, where this time the atmosphere was about as jovial as dawn on death row. It seemed that the
T-D
switchboard had been lit up like the diamond counter at a Dubai convenience store. Irate callers were demanding to know what that “uppity nigger wench’s” picture was doing in their morning newspaper, and Mr. Colburn had a fistful of letters posing the same burning question.

Some subscribers complained that upon seeing Pearl Bailey’s picture they’d been unable to finish their breakfast, and despite being on the hot seat, I had to smile at the thought of outraged readers cursing the newspaper and shoving aside their uneaten flapjacks, only to glance up to see a big mammy in a do-rag checking them out from a box of Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix.

While I wasn’t threatened with immediate dismissal over my indiscretion -- after all, the
T-D
had no official directive prohibiting the publication of likenesses of “uppity nigger wenches” -- it was made pristinely clear that were I to repeat my recent errors in judgment, I’d find myself writing obituaries for a weekly rag in Ice Worm, Alaska.

Less than a month later, Earl Wilson had reason to refer to Sammy Davis Jr. Talk about uppity! Davis had recently had the audacity to marry a white woman, the sexy blond Swedish actress May Britt, an act that landed him number one with a bullet at the top of every racist’s hate chart. I thought long, I thought hard. Little devils wrestled with little angels in the innermost chambers of my conscience. The devils cheated, of course, although where my conscience was concerned they were also more familiar with the terrain.

I got up from my seat at the copy desk, crossed the newsroom to the managing editor’s office and gave two weeks’ notice. “I’ve decided to do postgraduate work at the Far East Institute at the University of Washington,” I said. This was a move I’d actually been contemplating ever since my impulsive marriage to the stranger, Susan Bush. Accepting my resignation, Mr. Colburn shook my hand and wished me success -- whereupon I returned to my post and proceeded to make certain that the ultra-uppity face of Sammy Davis Jr. appeared in every edition of the next morning’s
Times-Dispatch.

I laughed myself to sleep that night. And two weeks later, I packed up my instant wife, her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and our belongings, and drove to Seattle.

The day before I left Richmond (January 2, 1962), I dropped in at the Village Inn for a farewell beer, shaking hands with Stavros “Steve” Dikos, the burly, curly-haired, ever-kindly owner, thanking him for maintaining and overseeing so compassionately what many might regard as a kind of wildlife preserve. The wildlife itself took turns, some a trifle enviously, wishing me luck on the road. I even received a catlike nod from “Mona Lisa,” a woman of a certain age who sat nightly at the counter chain-smoking, sipping industrial wine, and never speaking to anyone, just staring straight ahead with a faint, enigmatic smile, as if she and she alone knew when the Other Shoe would drop.

And speaking of enigmas, I’d earlier that day stopped by Il Palazzo della Contessa di Pepsi, wanting one last visit to prove to myself that the place existed outside of my imagination. Naturally, it was closed.

During my residency on this planet, I’ve had only one other encounter with an approach to retail merchandising quite as inexplicably single-minded as the Fan District Pepsi store. It occurred in Gibsonton, Florida, a small town southeast of Tampa that is winter quarters for approximately thirty traveling carnivals. Throughout the late 1980s and most of the nineties, I visited Gibsonton once or twice a year looking for canvas sideshow banners to add to my collection (good ones were hard to find since nowadays banners are made so cheaply they’re usually in a state of ruin after only one season); hanging out in the Show Town Bar, whose walls were adorned with photos of freaks and performers (they’ve now been moved to a newly built carnival museum); and generally absorbing the town’s peculiar ambience.

For a few years, the mayor of Gibsonton was the Human Torso, a woman born without arms or legs. To sign official documents, Mayor Torso grasped the pen between her teeth. Whether or not she was married to a giant as was rumored I couldn’t say, though it was not unusual to see a man, or men, more than eight feet tall about town, and there were plenty of tiny people on the scene as well. However, Gibsonton’s most famous resident, as even the most casual reader of supermarket tabloids may recall, was the Lobster Boy, the victim in a lurid murder case in 1992.

A rare congenital deformity had left the Lobster Boy with fingers and toes fused tightly together in a manner that resembled large claws. Depicted on banners as an actual, regular-size lobster with a human head, lolling on a seaside rock to the stunned amazement of bikini-clad bathing beauties, he was able -- in the days before political correctness roamed the earth -- to turn his misfortune into a fairly lucrative sideshow career. Walking with difficulty, he spent much of his time offstage confined to a wheelchair. He was seated in that chair watching TV when he was shot in the head by an eighteen-year-old Gibsonton neighbor, hired for the job by Mrs. Lobster Boy, who in court (her trial ran concurrently with the O. J. Simpson trial and was far more interesting) offered a spousal abuse defense. She claimed that every time she squeezed past his chair (they lived in a trailer where space was tight), he would reach out and pinch her with his “claws.”

Let’s try not to picture the act of conception, but the Lobster Boy fathered four children, two of whom, a boy and a girl, inherited his deformity, becoming part of a living sideshow tableau, the Lobster Family. Another son, adopted and anatomically normal, is, to the best of my knowledge, still performing on midways, ballyhooed as the Human Blockhead. In his act, he hammers nails and shoves ice picks up his nose. I guess showbiz just gets in one’s blood. In any case, the people who knew the Lobster Boy regarded him a cruelly mean alcoholic and few mourned his violent demise. Still, he was a major midway attraction for many years and I hope they at least thought to embalm him in melted butter.

Considering Gibsonton’s oddities and wonders, it shouldn’t be surprising that my wife Alexa and I were intrigued when on one of our visits there we came upon a crude handmade sign announcing a yard sale. We set out immediately for the address, and while we were to find no quaint or colorful carnival memorabilia, the yard sale did provide, in its quirky brand-name exclusivity, an experience reminiscent of Richmond’s Pepsi-only store.

The “yard” proved to be a vacant lot adjoining a gas station. Upon it were three long banquet tables. The tables were separated by enough distance that there appeared to be no connection between them or to the lone individuals who stood behind each table. Actually, only two were standing, the third person was not built to be comfortable for long in an upright position. From a sturdy chair, she confided to Alexa that she had been billed as “the Ton of Fun” in a carnival sideshow before an illness caused her to lose more than two hundred pounds. She was still about as big around as the average kitchen refrigerator, though no longer so fat that rubes would fork over cash money to ogle her blubber. The woman’s table was piled high with Butterfinger candy bars. Only Butterfingers. Hundreds of them. Hundreds! In bulk. For sale. We had to wonder if she was liquidating her personal stash.

Another table was equally loaded down with new blue cotton work shirts, all from the same manufacturer, Girbaud. On the third table there was nothing but stacks and stacks and stacks of Metamucil.

And there, folks, you have your yard sale: a specific brand of work shirt, candy bar, and popular over-the-counter laxative, each in massive quantities. Readers of my novels can be forgiven if they think I’m making this up, but Alexa is my witness, and if I exaggerate may the Human Blockhead pound frozen Butterfingers up my nostrils.

20

roll over, rossini

The very first time I attended a concert by a symphony orchestra, it was in order to review the performance for a leading metropolitan daily newspaper. The first time I ever went to the opera, it was for the very same reason. And in both instances, my critiques were published, presented to the public as if they were the reasoned and insightful opinions of an experienced musical authority. I suppose I owe it to readers, especially any who unlike me are classically cultured enough to tell
spezzati
from spaghetti, to explain how this charade came about.

When you blow up a major life situation, as I did on two fronts before leaving Richmond, the explosion can leave a hole in your psyche. Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and over time the crater is almost certain to fill in with new wisdom -- or fresh folly. Sometimes it can be a challenge to tell the difference. For example, my metamorphosis into a critic, indeed my first thirty months in Seattle overall, was a mingle of transformative revelations and screwball circumstances.

Susan, little Kendall, and I had arrived in Seattle on a Friday afternoon following a cross-country drive that lacked only a team of sled dogs to successfully re-create a scene from
Nanook of the North
. From western Pennsylvania to eastern Montana, Old Man Winter had a stick up his butt, punishing animal, vegetable, and mineral alike (cars count as “mineral,” don’t they?) with lashing winds, deadly low temperatures, and a great suffocation of snow. Unaccustomed to driving on ice, I braked abruptly at the lone stoplight in Perham, Minnesota, and went skidding into the rear of a farm truck. The truck shrugged it off and the damage to our Valiant was largely cosmetic, but the collision caused an air vent under our dashboard to stick open, permitting swirling snow, mile after mile, to blow up my pant leg. By the time we’d traversed North Dakota, the family jewels were so frozen they wouldn’t have looked out of place on Michelangelo’s marble statue of David.

Eastern Washington, while considerably more benign, was nevertheless chilly, its brown fields lightly dusted with snow, but once we crossed the Cascades and began our descent into Seattle, there’d been a dramatic shift, meteorologically and chromatically. It was like being gulped down the open throat of an emerald. A famous Italian journalist once began her interview with Muammar Gaddafi by asking the Libyan dictator if he had a favorite color, to which Gaddafi replied, “Green, green, green, green, green, green, green . . .” on and on, over and over, for nearly five minutes, she said, before she could get him to stop. The interviewer thought he was crazed but I think he was channeling Seattle.

Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist. These days, Seattle is not radically dissimilar to other large cities in California or back east, but in 1962 it was a magical metropolis, wrested from moss, mildew, and mud; animated more by chain saw and chi than by commerce and chutzpah; and although I would miss Richmond and miss aspects of it still, I was thrilled to the bone to have landed into this clam-chawed outpost where one might mix metaphors with impunity, bathed in oyster light beneath skies that resembled bad banana baby food. That darkening afternoon, watching Seattle’s hills begin to sparkle as if mounds of damp silage were being set upon by a trillion amorous fireflies blinking Morse code haikus that no Virginia cockroach could appreciate or understand, my heart informed my head that I had found my new home.

We’d traveled that northern route across the U.S., so fraught with wintry perils, neither out of innocence nor a craving for adventure but because I simply couldn’t afford the extra fuel required to take a warmer, drier southern route. As it was, I’d arrived in Seattle with only a hundred dollars in my wallet, three bodies to feed and house, and no clear prospect for fattening the kitty.

Barely had we entered the city, however, when, driving along Boren Avenue, precise destination unknown, I glanced up a side street and spotted a “For Rent” sign on a 1930s-era brick building. I made a quick right turn, parked on the northwest corner of James and Minor, went inside and handed over eighty-five dollars for the first month’s rent of a clean, roomy apartment. The landlord was Japanese American, which I took as a favorable -- even exciting -- omen, since, if truth be told, its connections and relative proximity to Japan were the reasons I’d sought out Seattle in the first place.

With the remaining fifteen bucks, I walked to a little corner market and stocked up on cheap, filling foods such as rice, beans, cereal, and a few decidedly non-Zen items like Dinty Moore beef stew. For a celebration, I splurged (it cost a whole ninety-nine cents) on a six-pack of beer. For several minutes, I studied the labels on Olympia and Rainier, debating which local brand to test-drive. Eventually, influenced by its label alone, I selected Olympia. It was the wrong choice. Everything else, however -- for days, weeks, and months -- was to go so miraculously well that events seemed choreographed by the gods.

The next morning, armed with a gracious letter of recommendation, believe it or not, from John H. Colburn of the
Times-Dispatch,
I found my way to the offices of the
Seattle
Times
. Even though it was a Saturday, I chanced that there might be someone in the newsroom with sufficient authority to answer my inquiry about the possibility of a part-time job. I was received by none other than managing editor Henry McLeod, who, after studying the letter (it evidently made no mention of Sammy Davis Jr.), informed me that an assistant features editor at the
Times
was about to depart for Europe on a six-month sabbatical and as yet no replacement had been hired. I started to work at the
Times
on Tuesday.

One of my assignments in the features department was to edit the daily advice column,
Dear Abby
. When its author, Abigail Van Buren, would visit a city whose paper carried
Dear Abby,
it was her habit to drop by that paper’s newsroom to pay respects. At the
Seattle
Times,
she specifically requested to meet the person responsible for the headlines on her columns therein, as they were, she said, most unlike the
Dear Abby
headlines in any other paper (and there were scores of them) that published her. I believe she used the adjective “colorful.” Thus it was that I came to shake the hand of the woman who’d comforted more brokenhearted lovers than all of the booze in all of the gin joints this side of Casablanca. In our brief conversation, though, I neglected to ask Abby what I might do about my new wife, to whom I was experiencing greater difficulty adjusting than to my new city.

The features department was located next to the much smaller arts and entertainment department, and toward the end of my projected six-month stint at the
Times,
I had an unobstructed view of a parade of little blue-haired ladies in tennis shoes coming by to interview for the recently vacated art critic position. It was a freelance position, actually, the
Times
art critic was not on staff, and as I watched the dilettantes and Sunday watercolorists sashay in and out, I remember thinking that visual art in Seattle was about to be smothered with a perfumed hankie. The threat had nothing to do with gender, mind you (women such as Barbara Rose, Lucy R. Lippard, and Rosalind E. Krauss were already among the most illuminating modernist critics in the business), but, rather, that these would-be arbiters of taste gave off a vibe clearly indicating an approach that would be reactive rather than analytical; that when evaluating art they’d consistently favor the traditional over the unfamiliar, the pretty over the rigorous, the decorative over the expressive, the fully clothed over the naked, the prudent over the bold.

At some point in the lamentation, it also occurred to me that once I started grad school -- I’d been accepted by the University of Washington -- I’d still need to augment the modest salary Susan was commanding from the brokerage firm where she’d just been hired. So, bending once again to impulse, and maybe even imagining myself a knight on a white donkey, I gathered a sampling of the art reviews I’d written for the
Proscript
at RPI, strolled into the office next door and plopped them down on the desk of arts and entertainment editor Louis R. Guzzo. “Why not me?” I asked.

Why not, indeed? A month or so later, after giving myself a crash course in Northwest art history (it helped a bit that we’d discussed painters Mark Tobey and Morris Graves in my aesthetic classes at RPI), I was being paid to look at paintings and sculptures, to think seriously about them, and propagate my opinions thereof, never mind that those opinions were only intermittently supported by deep knowledge or keen insight.

Soon there was another development. Lou Guzzo’s right-hand man, the assistant arts and entertainment editor, left for greener pastures (though what besides Gaddafi’s mania could be greener than Seattle?), and I was offered the job. I would be expected, in addition to my art beat, to attend and review those cultural events that were deemed not blue chip or mainstream enough to warrant Guzzo’s attention; to cover, for example, the UW drama department, various hootenannies, traveling ice shows, pop music, and foreign films. How cool was that?! I set about convincing myself (foolishly, as it turned out) that I could handle the load and still become fluent in Japanese.

Naturally, I accepted the offer. To be a reviewer, even for B-list events, on just about any newspaper is a dream job, and I’d sometimes fantasized about it when reviewing student plays and musical theater at RPI. Now I’d fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne. In fact, so many things had fallen into place, one after the other, in the nine months since I’d left Richmond that I began to suspect that Satchmo, Sammy, and Pearl Bailey, never mind the gods, were watching over me, moving the pieces.

And then . . . and then there was another unexpected development. (Was Pearl Bailey practicing voodoo?) My unsturdy shoulder had been to the arts wheel a scant few weeks when Lou Guzzo was hospitalized with a hemorrhaging ulcer. He’d come close to dying (easy with those pins, Pearl!), and wouldn’t return to work for nearly two months, during which time I, a raw rookie,
was
the arts and entertainment department of the
Seattle
Times,
B-list
and
A-list, the whole enchilada: talk about a baptism by fire! And that, patient reader, is how Tommy Rotten came to publish authoritative critiques of the first opera and the first symphony concert he’d ever in his life attended.

For its mid-winter concert, my symphonic cherry popper, the Seattle Symphony, had announced a Rossini program. It was a vaguely familiar name, Rossini, but I could no more have identified one of his compositions -- What? Rossini wrote the
William Tell
Overture? I would have sworn that was Tonto -- than I could have named the stars in the Crab Nebula. Nothing to do but head to the downtown branch of the public library and look him up. (Yes, the library: in 1962, “google” was the word for something obnoxious that clowns did with their eyes.)

There was a picture of Gioachino Rossini in a music encyclopedia, and I was immediately struck by how closely the composer resembled movie actor Robert Mitchum. They each, Rossini and Mitchum, projected an air of dreamy menace, primarily due to their heavy lids. “Bedroom eyes,” some might describe them, although in Mitchum’s case it was rumored that he looked perpetually sleepy because he was perpetually stoned, an opinion advanced by Hollywood gossipmongers after the actor was busted for smoking pot. There was no mention in Rossini’s biography of the composer having suffered a similar invasion of his privacy, but he was widely known as a “gourmand,” a polite French word for someone with the chronic munchies, and it’s easy to envision him raiding the pantry late at night in search of chocolate chip cookies. Moreover, Rossini had a reputation as a cynical wit and for hiding behind a mask of indifference, both characteristic of the film noir sensibility for which Mitchum was longtime poster boy. For composing the Stabat Mater, the ten-part work the Seattle Symphony performed that snowy evening, Rossini had received from his patron a gold, diamond-encrusted snuffbox (Really? “Snuff”?) and the music itself is as dark and expressionist as the best film noir, except for one quartet part that is strangely almost danceable.

Okay, I may have been reaching, but what else could I do? At the end of the concert I rushed back to the office and pecked out for the next day’s paper my assigned review, but because the musical knowledge I’d suddenly acquired in my library research was hardly adequate to fill the allotted space, I padded the critique with a few comparisons of Rossini and Robert Mitchum, their personas and their work, on a variety of fronts, real and imagined. Mostly imagined. Then I waited.

I waited for the reaction -- but there was none. Not a single symphony buff threatened to cancel her subscription, and although Rossini’s Stabat Mater was based on a Roman Catholic poem about Mary’s grief for Jesus, not one irate Christian petitioned to have me crucified. Curious. Especially so because my art reviews, which were a tad more conventional and a lot more knowledgeable, were generating considerable feedback. At any rate I decided to take silence as an affirmation, and thus encouraged, in my virgin review of an opera (I’ve forgotten which one) a couple of weeks later, I hinted that the performance would have been more riveting, more relevant had the chorus worn black leather jackets, the soprano been a biker chick, and the basso profundo a Hells Angel on speed. Impressed by the music but bored by the opera’s stuffy, stilted ambience, I seem to recall expressing regret there hadn’t been Harley-Davidsons onstage.

Doubtlessly influenced both by my recent purchase of a motorcycle and my abiding admiration for
The Threepenny Opera
(when I’d seen the über-edgy show in New York in 1961, it had knocked my socks off and fanned searing anti-establishment flames in my heart -- though, of course, by traditional standards the
Threepenny
is an opera in name only), this review, like the Rossini, provoked not even the mildest public rebuke. Mind you, I wasn’t actively soliciting punishment: I, a thin-skinned Cancerian, harbor not one masochistic cell in my body. My critiques were unorthodox simply because when confronted by my supreme ignorance of the subjects I was obliged to evaluate, I had little choice but to play the one wild ace that was always up my sleeve: my imagination.