Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (27 page)

There wasn’t an abundance of cranes in residence, that autumn being sufficiently mild to delay a wholesale migration from Siberia, but we did get a good close look at the early arrivals. Near the plastic chain-link fence that separated the miles of boggy crane habitat from human visitors, park rangers had strewn ears of corn, and the cranes showed no hesitation about approaching us gawkers to peck at their breakfast: like the whooper, the
tancho zuru
is not a meek bird. Its defiant nature, its refusal to compromise its way of life to adjust to human “progress,” may be one reason Asians regard the crane as sacred, a veneration American oil drillers and the Army Corps of Engineers fail to share.

While we weren’t treated to the cranes’ magnificent mating dance, a performance unequaled in all of nature (including John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
), the seventeen birds near the fence were no more sedate than we Yanks had been on the train; hopping about on pogo-stick legs, spreading their wings (a span of a good seven feet), pointing their beaks at the sky, and bellowing, often in duet, a call that resembled an amplified extract of Tokyo traffic. After a voyeuristic couple of hours, I figured I’d absorbed enough direct craneness to complement my library research, so we returned to Kushiro where, as our lumbering, squid-eyed innkeeper (he reminded Darrell Bob and me of Lenny from
Of Mice and Men
) served us a lunch of spiky-crab legs, red caviar, and seaweed, the disembodied voice of Natalie Wood once again came floating over the broken-tiled rooftops and dirty cement, making even the ubiquitous deposits of soot-speckled gull guano seem holy and right. Kushiro
mon amour
.

We parted company at the airport in Sapporo, a larger, brighter city to the southwest, so that Victor Mature Jr. could become Darrell Bob Houston again and attend to his assignment and his family back in Tokyo. We hugged good-bye, an embrace that caused men in the vicinity to turn away in ill-concealed discomfort. Miss Chocolate Cake bowed to me and said, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” Darrell Bob had taught her the phrase, and having no idea what it meant, she said it softly, sweetly, as though it were the most sentimental of endearments.

Alone now, I took a train down the dragon tail of Hokkaido (as spiky as a Kushiro crab leg), from where, on foot, I boarded a ferry to cross the strait that separates Japan’s northern and central islands. It was dusk and as the big vessel steamed out of Hakodate harbor, the sun was setting in one quadrant, a full moon was rising in another. On all sides of us, the open water was dotted with tiny wooden boats, each outfitted with luminous paper lanterns whose light was useful for attracting squid. It was as though the gods had plunked me down in the middle of a Hokusai wood-block print from the early nineteenth century. A solitary figure on the uppermost deck was playing a flute, ethereally, wistfully, as if coaxing the stars out of hiding, and, heart drumming an earthy accompaniment, my deep attraction to Japanese culture was rekindled.

In disdain for grimy Kushiro and the Coca-Cola commercialism of its “naturaley” crane park, I’d lost sight of
wabi-sabi,
the aesthetic of finding beauty in the imperfect and unexpected; the secret, private joy of being ever attuned to the Zen of things. These days, when people refer to Japan’s World War II atrocities, to its work-until-you-drop corporate climate, to its incongruent penchant for littering and polluting, and its reprehensible slaughtering of dolphins and whales, I remind myself of that most Zen of counterbalances: a big front has a big back.

On the flight home across the Pacific, I sought refuge from nippophilic brooding by reading a paperback novel. The book was Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five,
which, though it proved to have nothing to do with that branch of the Jackson family that went into the meat-packing business, succeeded pretty well in diverting me. I would not see Japan again until 2002, at which time I traveled the country on a reading and lecture tour sponsored -- believe it or not -- by the U.S. Department of State. A big back has a big front. Naturaley.

31

the american way

A foreign visitor can but speculate about what transpires behind the closed shutters and shoji screens of a murky, arcane city such as Kushiro, but someone like me who enjoys living in small American towns (though I’ve also resided years in metropoli such as Richmond, Omaha, Seattle, and New York) can attest that life in these apple-pie hamlets isn’t always reflective of scenes from Norman Rockwell paintings. The face our rural villages present to the world -- freckled, pie-stained, pious, and gullible -- can hide not only political corruption (or pathological ineptitude: often it’s hard to tell the difference), meth labs, and steamy surreptitious sexual shenanigans -- but all manner of just plain quirky behavior.

In South Bend, Washington, where I holed up to write my first novel, it was rumored that the mayor could neither read nor write. In any case, whenever he was presented with a document that required his signature, he’d always claim that he’d forgotten his glasses at home and ask someone to read the document to him.

The mayoral position paying little or nothing, His Honor supported himself by selling men’s suits -- not from a shop but from his car: a row of suits, predominately black or dark blue, hung from a rod above the backseat of his vintage Oldsmobile. Apparently, they would be purchased by local loggers or oystermen suddenly in need of proper attire to wear to a wedding or funeral. The story around town was that the mayor acquired the suits from unscrupulous undertakers in Seattle and Tacoma, who would disrobe corpses in their caskets (often dressed in brand-new clothing) once families and friends had had a final look. If the rumor was true, many a Puget Sound gentleman was left to face eternity as buck naked as the day he was born. Unless, that is, they were buried wearing their skivvies. Surely there’s no secondary market in drawers of the dead.

South Bend’s most noted resident was a real estate agent named Helen Davis. Ms. Davis had written Washington’s official state song. She’d also penned a couple of unsuccessful musical plays and fancied herself a concert singer. The mayor and his cronies were decidedly unimpressed with her talents, a fact they took no pains to conceal. The mayor had a hound dog that he’d taught to howl on command. There was a wooden bench on the town’s main street where in good weather older gents -- mostly retired loggers or oystermen -- would sit, smoke, chew, and swap tales. From time to time, the mayor, accompanied by his hound dog, would join them. Did I mention that he’d named the dog “Helen Davis”?

At an appropriate moment, the mayor would exclaim, loudly enough to be heard at the real estate office just down the block, “Come on, Helen Davis, sing us a song!” Whereupon the dog would throw back its head and commence to bay in a mournful voice that would have made a wailing banshee sound like Shirley Temple. Meanwhile, the two-legged Helen Davis would stand in the doorway of her office, hands on hips, turning various shades of red, purple, and violet. Some local residents found it more entertaining than television.

When I first started hanging out there, La Conner had a female mayor, somewhat of an anomaly at the time, though the fact that the second floor of its two-story town hall was rented out to a sculptor as an art studio was probably a clue that this rural hamlet was not your typical philistine outpost or vapid little Girl Scout cookieville. The town marshal was a man, however, as was his lone deputy. In addition to their police duties, the two were also responsible, due to budget constraints, for maintaining and repairing the sidewalks, gutters, and streets.

One unusually warm summer day, the marshal and his deputy were spreading fresh asphalt over a weather-beaten patch of pavement at the end of First Street when they commenced to argue over something or other. I’d like to believe the disagreement was metaphysical in nature but it likely concerned politics or sports. The topic most assuredly was not religion: to this day, when its population has swelled to approximately a thousand, there are only two churches in La Conner and except for the very occasional wedding or funeral, each is in use only for about an hour on Sunday mornings. In Warsaw, Virginia -- as an example of one of the towns Down South where I grew up -- there were four churches for white people, one for colored, to serve a mere four hundred souls, and at the Baptist house of worship there was something going on virtually every night of the week, week in and week out, though I cannot say that Warsaw was any more righteous than La Conner. At any rate, whatever the subject, the difference of opinion escalated, and before long it became physical. The two men -- marshal and deputy -- commenced to grapple, whereupon they toppled down onto the hot, sticky asphalt, and as a crowd of citizens and tourists gathered, they wrestled there. Within a minute, they resembled tar babies out of an Uncle Remus story. Or creatures from the Black Lagoon.

Since nobody dared step in and pull them apart (it would have required a sacrifice worthy of a Nobel Prize), they tussled in the tar until they exhausted themselves and, to a round of cautious applause (speaking of homegrown entertainment trumping TV), sheepishly, separately, slinked away, leaving gummy black footprints downtown that remained until the autumn rains.

Madame Mayor was not amused. Or, maybe she was and just stifled her laughter. Whatever her private reaction, she suspended both combatants for six weeks. And for six weeks there was no law in La Conner. According to full-time residents, the town has never been more peaceful.

In the early 1970s, La Conner, Washington, was the dwarf capital of America. Perhaps of the world. To be sure, there was a greater number of little people in both Sarasota and Gibsonton, Florida (circus and carnival winter quarters, respectively), but Sarasota was a city of nearly forty thousand, whereas even Gibsonton was three times the size of La Conner, whose title -- unofficial and unrecognized -- was predicated on a per capita basis: approximately seven hundred citizens, three of them dwarves. Nothing in either the water or the gene pool accounted for the ratio, however, because none of the three -- not the hippie dwarf, not the straight dwarf, not the Native American dwarf -- was related or had been born in La Conner. There was, in fact, nothing one could point to that might explain this small phenomenon, and it’s uncertain that anyone but me paid it any mind. I was predisposed, I guess, having resided my teen years in Warsaw, Virginia, with its magical family of world-class midgets.

The Indian dwarf lived on the Swinomish Reservation and rarely crossed the bridge into town. He was not even Swinomish, I was told, but on loan from another tribe for reasons never explained. On the other hand, the hippie dwarf and the straight dwarf were regular habitués of La Conner’s nightlife circuit, often enlivening the scene by demonstratively trading insults at the 1890s Tavern and the cocktail lounge of the Lighthouse Inn (it was a short circuit). The straight dwarf was Hollywood handsome, clean-shaven, sported a swept-back Michael Douglas haircut, and wore neatly pressed wool trousers and nice button-down-collar dress shirts. The hippie dwarf looked like a Hobbit. His graying hair hung down below his butt, while in front, the tip of his beard preceded his shoes in and out of rooms. The straight dwarf was incensed by the hippie dwarf’s appearance, accusing him almost nightly (after one or two full-size libations) of giving dwarves a bad name, only to be berated in turn for denying his offbeat birthright -- his congenitally issued passport to a life of individualism and dissent -- and selling out to “the man.”

As befitting his haircut, the straight dwarf was, indeed, involved in filmmaking, although on the production side, and after a time he moved to Utah to work on a series of wholesome nature movies financed by the Mormons. The hipster’s name was Maury Heald, and he possessed a heart, a spirit, a life force, and a résumé that would have dwarfed most men twice his size. In the fifties, for example, he’d traveled to Cuba to join the revolution, living with the rebels in the Sierra Maestras alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. A talented commercial artist, Maury worked as a draftsman for NASA at Cape Canaveral before it became Cape Kennedy, and it was while in Florida that he was saved from drowning by Esther Williams. He’d fallen into a pool, and due to the brevity of his legs, was ill equipped for swimming. Ms. Williams, the champion swimmer turned movie star, happened to be walking by and, fully clothed, dove to his rescue. He claimed he repaid her, though he didn’t say how.

It was at an advertising agency, in San Francisco if I’m not mistaken, that Maury designed the Frito pack, the same red-and-orange motif the package bears today. Obviously, it was a successful design, but one evening -- admittedly, we’d had a puff or two of pot -- Maury confided that it had wider and deeper implications. He revealed that the design, if scrutinized from a particular angle, held the visual key to the fifth dimension. I assumed he was putting me on, of course, but I must admit that ever since, I’ve found myself staring at Frito packages longer than good sense might dictate or the munchies require. The reader may be inclined to investigate more thoroughly than I.

32

“let tom run”

Although I’m unsure of the derivation of the term “banner year,” I think I know what it means, and in accordance with that meaning, 1971 was definitely a banner year for me.
Another Roadside Attraction
was published that year, Terrie gave birth to our son Fleetwood, and I met the literary agent Phoebe Larmore, who, more than forty years later, continues to represent me. Back from Japan, I was immersed in the writing of
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
and Phoebe’s efforts on behalf of that novel would elevate the trajectory of the rest of my life.

My contract for
ARA
gave Doubleday right of first refusal for my next book, stipulating an advance of five thousand dollars should they accept that book for publication. Phoebe, friendly with the young woman who’d been my editor at Doubleday, had had a peek at some early pages of
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
and was, she told me later, knocked out by them. Aware that I didn’t have an agent, perplexed by my poor contract and Doubleday’s seeming indifference, and confident that she could find a more supportive situation for me elsewhere, she wrote to me in La Conner (I couldn’t afford a phone) and offered her services. I thought it over for approximately as long as it would take a neutrino to travel through a slice of Swiss cheese at room temperature. And accepted.

By this time, however, I’d received the $5K, and it was keeping Fleetwood in diapers and me out of the fields at night. Operating behind the scenes, Phoebe enticed Ted Solotaroff, one of the last of the old-time hands-on Maxwell Perkins–style editors still working in New York, to read my manuscript-in-progress. Within days, Solotaroff privately offered to best Doubleday’s offer by a multiple of ten, provided I could somehow terminate my obligation to Doubleday. Up to the challenge, Phoebe now convinced Doubleday that I was blocked, suffering chronic back pain, and too stressed out to finish writing
Cowgirls.
Doubleday, all too cheerfully, agreed to cut me loose if I’d pay back the five grand, whereupon I borrowed that amount, half each from a couple of older friends, and linked up with Solotaroff at Bantam Books, which would remain my publisher for the next thirty-seven years.

Incidentally, Phoebe’s nose grew not by so much as a centimeter when she spoke of back pain: I was, indeed, hurting and it was relentless. Because it was so low -- down around the coccyx -- it would have qualified as what our cousins in Merry Olde call “a royal pain in the arse.” Many days, I was forced to write standing up. Due to its proximity to the nether regions, and the fact that spinal X-rays weren’t revealing anything definitive, my primary care provider eventually referred me to a proctologist.

Driving down to Seattle to have someone peer into, and perhaps probe with metal instruments, my personal allotment of the ancient mysteries was hardly my idea of a merry afternoon; so, as is my custom in unpleasant situations, I decided to squeeze at least a dollop of fun out of the ordeal, or, if nothing else, endeavor to lighten it up. To that end (pardon the pun), I dug out my duck mask.

This was no ordinary duck mask. This was not the ducky-wucky false face any mother would have chosen to enliven festivities at her little one’s birthday bash. Molded from hard plastic, thickish and crude, this mask -- a sickly yellow with a smear or two of red -- suggested the countenance of Donald’s thuggish cousin: the bad duck who’d done time in Folsom for armed robbery, the one who’d been escorted off the backlot at Disney for sexually molesting Minnie. It was difficult not to picture a hand-rolled cigarette or the stub of a cheap cigar dangling from its beak.

Concealed in an innocuous paper bag, the mask accompanied me to the proctologist appointment. There, a nurse ordered me to completely disrobe and don one of those embarrassing paper-thin cotton gowns that tie, always awkwardly, in the back. Bidding me sit on the edge of the examination table, she announced that Dr. Medwell would see me soon. The instant she left me alone, I retrieved my bag and put on the duck mask.

Upon entering the examination room, the doctor took one look at me and froze in his tracks. He did not move. He did not smile. He did not speak. Dr. Medwell just stood there for the longest time, staring, seemingly unsure whether to approach me or retreat. Finally, to relieve the tension, I said, “Well, aren’t you at least going to refer me to a veterinarian?” That broke the ice, but he still refused to examine me until I took off the mask.

Beginning in 1980, I had season tickets for Seattle Sonics basketball, attending virtually every home game for twenty-six years. A hoop fan as well, Dr. Medwell had purchased season seats in a section near my own, and frequently we’d run into one another entering or exiting the arena. Recently divorced, he was dating various women, and when he was with one I hadn’t met, he’d always introduce me, even years later, saying “This is the patient I told you about. The one with the duck mask.” Still in my possession, I suppose that mask and I are destined to go down in the annals (or should it be the “anals”?) of Seattle proctology.

The term “legendary,” like many another superlative or word denoting singularity or extreme excellence (not to mention wonder or marvel), has been in modern times so excessively and undeservedly employed by advertisers, media hacks, and the barely literate masses that it has lost much of its impact and nearly all of its meaning. When applied to New York’s Chelsea Hotel, however, it’s truer to its roots than a natural blonde. For many decades the Chelsea was home away from home for countless artists of every discipline, and its walls have witnessed legendary activities ranging from the sublime to the tawdry, from Bob Dylan composing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” to Sid Vicious stabbing his girlfriend. For one week in 1975, I resided in the Chelsea, riding the subway every business day up to 666 Fifth Avenue, where, at Bantam headquarters, Ted Solotaroff and I went over the
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
manuscript page by page, line by line.

The editing was attentive, it was scrupulous, yet ultimately featherlight, changes and corrections minimal at best. I was surprised. A notoriously slow writer, a writer in love with language and ideas, I was confident my prose was well wrought, yet it was also colored by a “crazy wisdom,”
wabi-sabi,
playful yet deadly serious approach not exactly commonplace in Western literature, and I wasn’t sure how this would fly with an old-school pro such as Solotaroff. At one point early in the unexpectedly painless process, Ted paused and told me the following story:

Jim Thorpe, who would go on to become by consensus the greatest athlete of all time, was in 1911 a student at tiny Carlisle Indian Institute in Pennsylvania. This was at a time when Harvard was a national football powerhouse, so fans chuckled when charitable Harvard deigned to go down to Carlisle and engage the poor boarding school Indians on the gridiron. Harvard’s team featured an all-American linebacker known for his strength, vision, and unusual lateral quickness, and regarded as the best player in the country. On Carlisle’s first play, Thorpe, unable to outmaneuver the linebacker, was tackled barely beyond the line of scrimmage. The same thing occurred on the next play. On third down, Thorpe called his number again. This time, instead of trying to run past Harvard’s star, the Indian from the hills of Oklahoma ran directly at him, knocked him down, ran over him, and raced eighty yards for a touchdown. Then he circled, ran back up the field at full speed, picked up the linebacker (who still lay on the ground), held him in the air, shook him hard, and said politely but emphatically, “Let Jim run.”

Ted allowed this to soak in for a moment. Then he said, “It didn’t take me long to conclude that that was the only sensible approach to editing this book of yours. No editor can hope to impose his will on a performance like this one. We’ve got to let Tom run.”

At the time, Bantam Books was a mass-market paperback publisher, buying, at auction, reprint rights to successful hardcover books and reissuing them in inexpensive, small-format, paperback editions. However, Solotaroff and some confederates were scheming to change that business model, and their maneuver began with
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
. After first buying
Cowgirls,
Bantam then sought to auction off the hardcover rights. This constituted a major turning of the tables, a significant reversal of tradition, and the move met with considerable resistance in the publishing world. Bantam’s ploy, the first of its kind in the history of New York publishing, was almost universally scorned. Almost. Eventually, one brave soul at Houghton Mifflin, the venerable Boston house, thumbed a patrician nose at custom, purchasing rights from Bantam in a precedent-shattering deal, and in 1976 introduced simultaneous hardcover and trade paper editions of
Cowgirls.
(Bantam would issue the mass-market paperback a year later.)

By no means an out-of-the-gate galloping success,
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
did all right for itself. The
New York Times
compared it favorably to Thomas Pynchon, Pynchon himself wrote that it dazzled his brain, calling it “a piece of working magic,” and me “a world-class storyteller.” The Bantam paperback, when it appeared in ’77, did attract a large following, almost entirely via word of mouth, and
Cowgirls
remains my best-known (though not best-executed) novel, doubtlessly because it was filmed (in 1993) and movies, deserving or not, are perceived as sexier than books.

Particularly admired by women,
Cowgirls
was for years the only novel by a male author to be sold in some feminist bookstores. A philosophy professor from Wright State University delivered a paper at a conference in which she claimed that
Cowgirls
represented the first work in history in which a female protagonist undertook the classic hero’s journey, passing through all of the stages as outlined by Joseph Campbell in his monumental study,
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
. While I was flattered by the reference to Campbell and world mythology, I must confess that the feminist thrust of
Cowgirls
had simpler origins.

In Appalachia in the thirties, we kids -- free from the intrusion of wholesale technological entertainment -- amused and grew ourselves with improvised role-playing games, usually of an adventurous nature. Our backyard exercises in make-believe were varied in content, and while dominated by masculine examples, were seldom gender-specific. My beloved cousins Martha and June could assume the persona of a cowboy, an Indian, a pirate, a pilot, a cop, a robber, or a soldier as readily as Johnny or Georgie or I. It wasn’t until many years later that it occurred to me that while any of us boys could actually, theoretically, grow up to be a soldier, an explorer, a cowhand, or a detective, those opportunities, particularly in the South at that time, were simply out of the question for Martha and June. Their aspirations, exposed to the harsh beam of reality, would have been both more limited and more tame.

Thus it was in sympathetic retaliation that I peopled my second book -- a language-driven seriocomic novel that raised the flag of physical, psychological, sexual, and spiritual freedom -- not only with a female hitchhiker whose exploits on the road surpassed those of Jack Kerouac and pals, but with young women who, determined to finally realize their cowgirl fantasies, take over a ranch by force. This action costs one of them, their leader, her life -- but one should never operate under the illusion that one can always live out one’s wildest fantasies with impunity. One must be willing to be charged a high price.

Yesterday, while examining for the first time in many years, a first edition of
Cowgirls,
I came across excerpts from reviews of its predecessor,
Another Roadside Attraction,
evaluations in which I as a writer was likened to Mark Twain (by the
Los Angeles Times
), James Joyce (
Rolling Stone
), and Nabokov and Borges (
Playboy
). Apparently, the book garnered its share of raves after all. How like an unevolved Cancerian to hold on to his negative notices and forget that there were others that many authors might have killed for.

Since publication of
Cowgirls,
it has been my policy never to read reviews, though people do voluntarily quote them to me, some out of shared pride in my perceived success, others out of malicious glee in what they regard as a well-deserved public scourging. I can’t say for certain if my no-read policy has been wise or foolish: who knows what good advice I may have missed? On the other hand, it has shielded me from unnecessary distractions (God knows there is a sufficiency of those already), while the elixir of understanding that every ego, however philosophically downsized, enjoys and at times even craves, is usually supplied -- occasionally by the bucketful -- from other sources.

For example, not long after the publication of my third novel, I received a letter from a young woman, a stranger, that read in part, “Your books make me laugh, they make me think, they make me horny, and they make me aware of all the wonder in the world.” I’ve never forgotten that testimonial because she smacked the nail on the head with a titanium hammer: though I’m oblivious to it during the act of writing, those are precisely the responses I might wish my books to arouse. And is there a higher accomplishment for any novel, any poem, than to awaken some reader’s sense of wonder? Probably not.

My most cherished accolade from that period, however, had nothing to do with matters literary, except perhaps in the most indirect way. Terrie and I had split not many months after Fleetwood’s birth, our brief marriage another casualty of the turbulent sixties and its libertine mores, but we’d remained close and were sharing, in separate domiciles, the rearing of our son. One day when Fleetwood was three, Terrie took him shopping with her in a nearby town, La Conner being blissfully bereft of malls, corporate outlets, and franchise stores of any category. There, she fell into conversation with a fellow shopper, an older woman who at one point turned to Fleet and asked, “And what does your daddy do, little boy?”