Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (2 page)
Read Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life Online
Authors: Tom Robbins
Throughout most, maybe all, of my childhood, my mother’s pet name for me was Tommy Rotten. I use the term “pet name” advisedly, for though it had been born in perplexity and consternation, it was invariably spoken with affection -- and sometimes actually with a kind of ill-concealed admiration.
Lest anyone be tempted to characterize Tommy Rotten as a prototype of Bart Simpson, let it be known that for all my reckless (and usually hedonistic) mischief, I was as much a Lisa Simpson as a Bart. That is to say, I was cursed with that gene that causes children thusly afflicted to exhibit overt signs of sensitivity, to go around creating stuff (drawing pictures, putting on puppet shows, banging on the piano); and, in extreme cases, to behave as if the thermostats on their imaginations were set permanently on high.
It was almost as if some mad literary fairy, hatched perhaps in a poppy in Oscar Wilde’s garden, had tapped me with her wand as I lay in my cradle, because I fell totally in love with books as soon as I knew what books were, and I hadn’t been talking in complete sentences for many months before I announced to my parents that I intended to be a writer.
Too impatient to wait until I could spell words and scrawl them on paper, I turned my mother into my private secretary. When the muse bit me, as she did rather frequently, being indifferent to child labor laws, I’d call on Mother to stop whatever she was doing and take dictation. The fact that she was so willing to comply may be attributed to the fact that Mother herself was a frustrated writer. At eighteen, she’d been offered a scholarship to Columbia University but had been too frightened to move to New York.
It was doubtlessly her sublimated literary ambition that prompted Mother to occasionally change the wording of my dictation, to improve (in her opinion) my prose style. However, I always remembered each and every sentence I’d spoken, and would throw a tantrum until she restored my wording verbatim. When in 1975 I recounted this to Ted Solotaroff, my editor on
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
he exclaimed, “My God, Robbins, you haven’t changed in forty years!”
In any case, when for my fifth birthday I was given a
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
scrapbook, I began filling it not with pasted pictures but my dictated -- and unedited! -- stories. The very first of those stories (the scrapbook still exists) was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a tiny desert island, a barren place whose sole inhabitant was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had survived by learning to gastronomically process sand. In time, it taught the pilot to eat sand, as well, and they lived there together, man and bovine, in friendship and good health.
What meaning can we take from this first attempt at literature? That fortune favors those who improvise? That we humans have much to learn from animals? That we should insist on joy in spite of everything? The fact that the pilot didn’t rather quickly butcher the cow and commence cooking it up (thereby ensuring his starvation when the meat ran out), was that an object lesson in sustainability; a prophetic fable intended to encourage future generations to seek alternatives to the greedy, thoughtless consumption that one day would threaten to suicide the planet? You’d have had to ask little Tommy Rotten -- and he wasn’t talking.
Noticing that I squinted whenever I scanned the funny papers, my parents fetched me to an optometrist. As a consequence, and much to my embarrassment, I entered first grade wearing a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. The school year was only a month or so old when Charley, the class roughneck, punched me in the face, shattering my glasses.
Can’t imagine what I might have said to provoke the little bastard. At any rate, I was physically unharmed, but the force of the blow sent a shard of glass flying (oh, delicious irony!) into
his,
Charley’s, right eye, and it had to be surgically removed.
Take heed, ye foul-spirited critics. Scurrilous attacks have been known to backfire.
As mentioned, I started writing fiction at age five. Hardly an overnight success, however, I didn’t get published until I was seven.
I attended a large consolidated school, grades one through twelve in the same three-story building. There was a biweekly school newspaper, edited and almost exclusively written by juniors and seniors. Well, I had recently composed on notebook paper (the
Snow White
scrapbook having long since been filled) a rather melodramatic story featuring a reckless boy, a courageous dog, and a dangerous waterfall; so one day during recess I trudged up to the third-floor newspaper office, slapped the story down on the surprised editor’s desk, and said, “Print
this
.”
It appeared in the next issue. And I thought,
Hmm. That was easy. Maybe I could do this for a living.
Flushed, perhaps, by having become a literary lion in the second grade, I proposed marriage. As evidence of my sincerity, I gave my intended a ring, a kitschy little costume trinket with a wobbly glass stone. The ring had cost me twenty-five cents -- and lest anyone think me cheap, please consider that in 1939, a quarter could buy two hamburgers and a hot dog -- with mustard, onions, and relish -- at Bynum’s Café (not to mention five new sun suits from Tommy Rotten).
Was it Nancy Lentz to whom I proposed or was it her cousin Toni? I can’t remember which, they were both beauties, nor do I recall if she did more than giggle incomprehensibly at my matrimonial gesture. I do remember that it was Gwendolyn Berryman with whom that same year I played one-on-one “post office” (a “letter” was a kiss, a “package” an embrace) in the front seat of the Berryman sedan, parked in our driveway while, oblivious, our moms chatted away in the living room.
What was the source, one might ask, of such overtly romantic impulses in a boy so young? We could do worse than lean on Bob Dylan. Because the answer is, indeed, blowing in the wind. Blowing. Blowing Rock.
Having spent significant and affecting years in each of them, I claim to have five hometowns (and never mind that not one of them would likely lay claim to me). Listed in reverse order, they are: La Conner and Seattle in Washington state; Richmond and Warsaw in Virginia; and Blowing Rock, North Carolina, the town where I was born, the final resting place of my kin, and the site of all the events so far described in this account.
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Blowing Rock is in the mountains. The highest incorporated town east of the Rockies, Blowing Rock is
on
the mountains, atop the mountains. From Blowing Rock, baby, it’s all downhill.
The town took its name from a geological formation, an actual rock, an immense cliff of metamorphic gneiss, a jutting promontory that protrudes like God’s sore thumb out over the Johns River Gorge more than three thousand feet below. It’s possible to rather easily climb out onto the rock, and marvel there at a panoramic view any postcard would die for, though the perch is not for the vertiginous. Okay, but why “Blowing”?
The rocky walls of the gorge form a flume through which silent winds sweep with considerable force, although atop the rock itself it’s usually calm. A visitor can toss a handkerchief, a paper cup, or any light object off of the cliff, watch it go spiraling hundreds of feet down down down into the purplish mist far below, until a mysterious current suddenly seizes it, lifts it up up up and blows it back over the head of the tosser, who may then turn, retreat a few yards, and retrieve that which he or she has tossed (hopefully, not his or her cookies). In winter at the Rock, the snow falls upside down.
It’s unthinkable that a natural phenomenon of this order, as mystifying as it is spectacular, would not generate local myth. In recent years, the mythology surrounding the Rock has taken on complex cinematic properties, as if rewritten by a Chamber of Commerce booster with a made-for-TV sensibility, but the simpler and somehow sweeter legend I heard as a child went like this:
A Cherokee maiden has received word via the tom-tom telegraph that her lover and husband-to-be has been killed in battle. Inconsolable, the distraught girl goes to the Rock and hurls herself, wailing, into the abyss. Before she hits bottom, however, sympathetic and all-knowing wind spirits catch her, bear her aloft, blow her back onto the Rock and into the arms of her approaching lover, who it turns out was only wounded, not slain as the drums reported.
Now, growing up in that landscape and in that narrative (my young pals and I were all over the Rock like ants over a loaf, my imagination swam in the mythology like sperm in a love bath), how could I have
not
succumbed to romanticism?
The dark woods, the singing creeks, the stars just barely out of reach; the great stone ships, their prows pointed eternally at
elsewhere
. Air as clean as freshly laundered bedsheets; owls hooting from hidden linen closets, asking
who, who,
who dares to follow the bear god’s spoor down oblique paths where reality is a network of shadows and time is prone to lose its bearings? And scattered everywhere among the pines -- like the topaz droplets of resin that frescoed our bare heels in summer -- were ancient invisible Cherokee kisses, kisses known to have triumphed over death.
When in addition to the natural environment and prevailing folklore, we factor into the equation fairy-tale books with their lovelorn princes and princesses, the chivalrous tales of King Arthur’s knights, and the movies in which Tarzan went swinging through the greenery with Jane on his hip, we may arrive at an algorithm that explains why Tommy Rotten gave his heart to Nancy Lentz (or was it Toni?) and his own paleface kisses to Gwendolyn Berryman.
Tarzan movies were indeed screened in Blowing Rock (from the moment I first beheld loinclothed Johnny Weissmuller traversing with a wild yodel the free space between heaven and earth, Jesus was permanently dislodged from his position atop my fiery pantheon), although the films were shown only in summer. Let me explain.
Blowing Rock was a summer resort, and a rather posh one. Lured by the area’s beauty and cool mountain air, wealthy families from throughout the Southeast maintained summer residences there. The Cannon textile barons had a huge estate, as did the R. J. Reynolds tobacco clan, and the Coca-Cola Snyders from down in muggy Atlanta. Beginning in early June, our sidewalks sported pedestrians in tennis whites and gold jewelry, our streets opened their asphalt arms to European sports cars and luxury sedans. There were boutiques with flagship stores in West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, a produce stand that displayed fruits (avocados, papayas, yellow plums) that no hillbilly could identify let alone afford; and then there was the movie theater that showed first-run films as soon as they opened in Los Angeles and New York -- until Labor Day Tuesday, that is, when it went as dark as the Tomb of the Unknown Gaffer.
It was an annual occurrence. Come June, the merry masquerade began; come September, Appalachian reality settled upon the community with a mournful sigh. The shops were shuttered, golf courses deserted, the last fancy auto went Cadillacking down the mountain and out of town. Even the Louis XVI colors of the autumn leaves failed to paint over the detail that many residents would have to survive for nine months on what they’d earned in three. There would now be fatback suppers, rotgut hangovers, malnourished kids, flour-sack fashions, occasional stabbings; and always outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, scabies, and head lice. And then . . . and then June would jack out of its box and life would get healthy and merry again.
Unconsciously, Tommy Rotten learned a great lesson from this seasonal seesaw. As his brain involuntarily traced the arc between the glamorous and the drab and back again, he became attuned to the rhythms of change, to the balance of opposites, to the yang and the yin, to the rise and fall of the cosmic pumpkin; and he came to take a kind of solace in the knowledge that paradox is the engine that runs the universe. In the novels he was to write as an adult,
transformation
(along with liberation and celebration) was a major theme.
It would be a mistake to suggest that the off-season in Blowing Rock, for all of its hardships, was devoid of interest.
Au contraire
. Even during the long Decembers of the Great Depression, the place exuded a fascinating flavor. For a boy with a kinetic imagination, it could be nothing short of magical.
Allowed to roam freely in both the streets and the woods, I observed and interacted not only with the wonders of nature but with an assortment of squirrel hunters, rabbit trappers, berry pickers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, tramps, real Gypsies, snake handlers, muleback preachers (like my grandpa), eccentric characters with names such as Pink Baldwin and Junebug Tate, and perhaps most influential, bib-overalled raconteurs, many of whom spun stories as effortlessly and expertly as they spit tobacco juice.
All of this gave me an appetite for enchantment -- and I haven’t even mentioned the pastor’s little daughters, with whom, at their invitation, I used to play “doctor.” In this game, participants took turns being patient and physician. Highly instructive, it was hands-on, anatomically correct, and nobody on either end of the examination table gave a rip about insurance. Harvard Medical School, eat your heart out!
Any consideration of Blowing Rock’s influence that fails to mention The Bark is incomplete. A roadhouse on the outskirts of town, The Bark took its name from the unmilled cedar shakes with which it was sided, and its interior was as notorious as its exterior was rustic. Behind that rough facade, customers drank beer and danced, activities that to any good Southern Baptist invoked the Devil himself.
My mother, a stalwart in the church (her father, like my father’s father, was a Baptist preacher), taught a Sunday school class for committed Christians in their late teens and early twenties. On Wednesday evenings, the class met at our house. The meetings were part religious, part social; and after prayers, as young Baptists nibbled cookies and sipped punch, gossip (evidently not a sin) would typically bloom. Invariably, someone would blurt out, if it’s possible to blurt in a hushed tone, “Mary Jones was seen leaving The Bark Friday night.” Or, “Saturday, Daddy saw John Doe’s pickup parked at The Bark, and it was there for hours and hours.”
These bits of intelligence were always greeted with audible gasps, followed by much wagging of chin and clucking of tongue. If The Bark was forbidden fruit, then the shock, the awe with which they spoke of it, applied a polish, a sheen to its peel that in my imagination (I was eight, nine at the time) glowed like a peach of solid gold. I grew as attracted to that roadhouse as to the jungles of Tarzan and Jane.
On our way to the Rock or one or another of our various woodland hideouts, my buddies and I frequently passed The Bark, and we tended to pause there for long minutes and stare at the place, as if it were an evil castle where a great treasure was stored. Once in a while we’d see gentlemen emerge (after, we knew, a bout of drinking and dancing inside); we’d see some tattooed fellow with a cigar in his teeth, and with what the Sunday school crowd called a “floozy” on his arm; watch the couple straddle a big Harley-Davidson and go roaring out of the red clay parking lot, enveloped in an oxygen of freedom about whose perils and rewards we could scarcely guess. At those moments, all I wanted was to quickly become old enough to drink beer, dance, get tattooed, smoke cigars, ride motorcycles, and have a floozy of my own on my arm.
Eventually I was to accomplish all of those things -- and they proved in no way a disappointment. Who said The Bark was worse than its bite?
