Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (28 page)

Pausing not a second for reflection, Fleet answered immediately and forthrightly, “My daddy’s a mad magician.”

What??? Wow! I’d no idea Fleetwood knew either the word “mad” or “magician,” let alone how to juxtapose them in a coherent sentence: as I said, he was three years old. And though I quizzed him on numerous occasions and at some length, even bribed him with potato burgers at the Mount Vernon Chuck Wagon, he would never expound upon his idea of his father’s job description. Suffice to say, I guess, that I took it as the highest of compliments, then and now, and were the epitaph “Mad Magician” to be chiseled on my tombstone, I know I would rest in peace -- even were some immoral funeral director to sell off my burial clothes. Including my undershorts.

Speaking of nonliterary or extraliterary endorsements, my other son Rip, whom I’d fathered with Peggy back in the Age of Feeling Horny But Knowing Nothing, and whom I’d not seen since he was a babe, came back into my life during this period. His mother had married a well-to-do gentleman in Delaware and throughout Rip’s childhood she had told him what a no-good beatnik bum his biological father was. Not surprisingly, as soon as he turned eighteen, he came looking for me and spent a few weeks checking me out. A year or so later he returned to La Conner and has resided nearby ever since. Evidently, some lads like a bit of “mad magician” or “beatnik bum” in their papas.

33

hollywood, hollywouldn’t

I’d been in Shelley Duvall’s kitchen merely seconds before I noticed the ants. Not that the room was crawling with them, the ants were concentrated in one place -- along the windowsill above the sink -- but they teemed there in numbers that might have inspired the Vatican to consider the historical context of that ominous biblical directive to “go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth.”

What was I doing in Shelley Duvall’s kitchen? I’d gone in there to fetch a beer from the refrigerator, and mission accomplished, returned to the living room, where I gave Shelley the bad news that a plague of ants was descending upon her kitchen. I advised her to call an exterminator. “Oh, no,” the actress said cheerfully. “They’re just having lunch.”

Before I could take a sip of beer she led me back into the kitchen, showed me a squeeze bottle of honey, and demonstrated how around noon every day she would squeeze a line of honey onto the sill, opening the window just a crack so that the ants on her property might come in and dine.

Well, that was Shelley for you, in real life as so often on-screen: completely loopy in a big-eyed, long-lashed, childlike, and endearing sort of way. She gave a more traditional performance in
The Shining,
but while others around me in the theater were transfixed by Kubrick’s creepy masterpiece, by Jack Nicholson’s escalating homicidal madness, I could not look at Shelley, even in the more terrifying scenes, without smiling and thinking,
That woman feeds ants in her kitchen.

I’d gone to Shelley’s home to take a meeting with a couple of young screenwriters. There had been Hollywood interest in
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
throughout the late seventies; the book had been optioned several times, and two adaptations had been written, both by experienced screenwriters, but the scripts hadn’t worked. The writers just hadn’t gotten it. Now Shelley Duvall was wanting to produce and star in
Cowgirls,
and to that end was interviewing writers. I was encouraged that the pair she’d invited to her house that Sunday were young, less crimped by tradition, but we hadn’t conversed very long before it became apparent to me that they weren’t going to get it either.

What was it none of these guys were getting? Why, the tendency for the serious and the comic to commingle, sometimes almost seamlessly, in life generally and in my novel particularly. Oh they were aware, surely, that comedy, especially slapstick comedy, has an underlying element of desperation, but finding and acknowledging the comedic that can infiltrate everyday sober circumstance was foreign to them, as was the broader notion that human reality is often simultaneously somber and funny. I, on the other hand, have always looked at life that way, and reading Hesse, Nietzsche, and Alfred Jarry (not to mention forays into Eastern philosophic systems and psychedelics) had reinforced my sense that this is just the way our world is ordered. Convincing a screenwriter that such a perspective should be or could be the secret spice that flavored any successful adaptation of
Cowgirls
was proving futile, however. The writers were frankly incapable of thinking that way. Humorous in one scene, serious in the next: that they could manage, but both in the same scene . . . ? Not happening.

Did Shelley Duvall get it? Maybe, maybe not. In any case, she didn’t hire the two writers we interviewed at her free-form ant farm. And a month or so later she phoned (I’d finally gone telephonic) to say that she had written a script herself. Really? Yes, and she wanted me to come back to L.A. and meet with a director to whom she was going to pitch her screenplay. I hadn’t heard of Alan Rudolph at that time, but the fact that he’d come recommended by Robert Altman was good enough for me.

We met at a German restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. I’d glanced over Shelley’s “script” right before Rudolph arrived -- and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Only twenty-three pages in length (the average script is a hundred pages longer), single-spaced, no paragraphs, no separated passages of dialogue, it gave the impression of having been written by a delusional senior in a North Dakota nursing home, someone who’d not only never seen a film script in her entire life, but had neglected to consult an instruction manual. Rudolph, I was certain, would take one look at this debacle, shake his head in disbelief, and flee the restaurant before we could order a schnitzel.

Astonishingly, the director who, I was to learn, had made invaluable and largely uncredited contributions to Altman classics such as
Nashville
and the sadly underrated
Buffalo Bill and the Indians,
skimmed through Shelley’s nonscript (it didn’t take long), nodded, and said matter-of-factly, “Sure. Good. I can make this.”

And he meant it. He wasn’t being facetious. What’s more, he really
could
have made it. As he was to demonstrate repeatedly in ensuing years, if ever there was an American director capable of extracting diamond dust from Shelley’s lumpy little sack of charcoal, who could have successfully straddled that
Cowgirly
borderline between the edgy and the sweet, it would have been Alan Rudolph. His smoky, neon-bathed romances have seldom shied from directing our eyes to the poignant goofiness that can infect the most sophisticated of modern relationships. His lens charts the wobble in the orbit of the heart, his absurdist wit lends existential wisdom to film noir scenes that from another director might be only violent and banal.

For the knowing and confident way in which he agreed to take on that dopey script, I developed a kind of instant man crush on Rudolph, but Shelley was unable to get the project funded and eight years would pass before another actress would hook me up with him again. In 1987, my friend Debra Winger talked Rudolph into casting me as a toymaker in
Made in Heaven,
a studio movie being shot in Charleston and Atlanta, and during the shoot Alan and I developed a lasting friendship, despite the fact that he cut the single best line I’d written for my character: “Toys are made in heaven -- but the batteries come from hell.”

One of the perks of associating with celebrities is that you get to experience firsthand the state of invisibility. Step out in public with any rock star or Hollywood actress and
poof!
-- you disappear. People look right through you. It’s a kind of enchantment, more effective than the graduate program at Hogwarts. Once during the filming of
Made in Heaven,
however, the tables turned and the cloak of invisibility unexpectedly fell about unaccustomed shoulders.

There had been a small but lively dinner party at the house in Charleston provided to Debra Winger and Timothy Hutton for the duration of the shoot. The house was in an upscale neighborhood a good distance from the downtown hotel where most of the cast and crew were lodged. At the end of the evening, I caught a ride back to the hotel with Neil Young and his manager. In the conversation that ensued, Neil learned for the first time that the guy in the backseat was a novelist. He’d never heard of me or my books, assuming all evening that I was an assistant producer or some other functionary connected to Lorimar Studios. He was mildly surprised, I suppose, but didn’t seem particularly impressed.

It was well past midnight and the hotel lobby was deserted. To retrieve our room keys, Neil and I approached the front desk more or less in tandem. When we got closer to the desk, the night clerk -- a pretty woman in her early twenties -- suddenly lit up like a ballpark, clutched her chest, and made an audible sound that resembled a mixture of a sigh, a squeal, and a purr. Naturally, Neil thought the excitement was for him.

“You’re Tom Robbins, aren’t you?!” the girl gushed. “I heard you were staying with us.” She went on to tell me how wonderful my books were, how much they meant to her, while the great Neil Young (and he truly
is
great) waited impatiently -- invisibly -- for his key. The human ego is a treacherous apparatus, best kept at a safe distance from the self, but I confess I took a small measure of pleasure in making a star play the transparent ghost for a change.

34

woodpecker rising

Prior to the publication of
Still Life With Woodpecker,
I had trouble referring to myself as a “novelist” without feeling like a fraud, an attitude engendered less by modesty or insecurity than a respect for the profession, for the craft, for language itself, a reverence that in today’s world may have gone the way of the “vine-ripened” tomato. But, when in 1980 Bantam Books, after paying me a substantial advance, brought out
Woodpecker
as its very first hardcover publication; and when the large-format trade paper edition -- issued simultaneously -- shot to number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list and I found myself on one of those coast-to-coast book tours, violating flyleaves with my nasty scrawl and fielding questions from the press, well, I could at last look in a mirror and believe that a genuine, full-fledged, full-time
author
might be staring back at me. It was cool, I can’t deny it, but I also possessed just enough good sense to remind myself that whom the gods would destroy they first make popular.

My initial personal buffeting by the gale of glory, the fickle gusts of literary fame, occurred in Austin, Texas. My appearance for a signing there attracted such an unexpected throng that the bookstore, to accommodate the crowd, set up my signing table in the beer garden next door, and I sat there, without once getting up to stretch or pee, and signed and signed and signed -- for five whole hours. It was, as I said, a beer garden, and people were imbibing while they waited in line. Toward the end of the evening, many of those who approached my table, those who’d been far back in the line, were more than a little sloshed, a condition that inspired some interesting conversations. And behavior . . .

We were about four hours into the event when a young lady, emboldened by alcohol, and perhaps
Woodpecker
’s audacious male protagonist (she’d been leafing through a copy of the book as she waited her turn), unbuttoned her blouse as she neared the table and requested that I autograph not only her book but
her
. Always willing, when possible, to accommodate a reader, and suspecting that John Hancock might well have preferred this opportunity to the Declaration of Independence, I brandished my Sharpie and in a jiggling jiffy my signature was emblazoned across two well-formed lumps of what -- with the possible exception of mayonnaise and butterscotch cream pie -- is the highest known usage of fat: a perfectly matched pair of baby snow pups, or what some of us are inclined to think of as “the twin moons of paradise.”

Well, this fair damsel proved to be a trendsetter. She was a student at the University of Texas, and we know how susceptible college kids are to fads. From that point on, at least four of every ten females in line bared her breasts when she reached the table, asking to be suitably inscribed. Ah, Texas! (A big back has a big front, in more ways than one.) At the conclusion of the event, one of the adorned girls was still hanging around the table, signaling with her eyes that she wished to take me home, perhaps to obtain my endorsement on other parts of her anatomy, but as drained by then as a hemophiliac on a blind date with a vampire, all I could manage was a weak wave as my handlers practically carried me to a waiting car.

On our way to the hotel, Bantam’s regional sales representative, smiling and shaking his head, drawled to no one in particular, “Man, we sure moved some product tonight.” That was, believe it or not, the first time that I ever entertained the notion that novels, especially my novels, could be categorized as “product.” Obviously, I knew that works of fiction were bought and sold, but like goods, like merchandise? The concept so jarred my sensibilities that it wiped much of the shine off the previous five hours, leading me to the unhappy realization, as I fell into bed, that to some people -- people who worked for, say
Playboy
magazine or Hooters -- even the “moons of paradise” might be considered “product.”

Terry Bromberg, the Bantam publicist who accompanied me on the
Woodpecker
tour, shared my enthusiasm for culinary exploration. In every city we visited, we made it a point to sample the local specialties. In Austin, we’d relished a fine, authentic Mexican breakfast late on the morning after the marathon signing, and we were walking back to the hotel to check out when it occurred to us that we’d failed, so far, to experience the pecan pie for which that region of Texas is somewhat renowned. We consulted our watches. It was very nearly noon, our flight didn’t depart until two, and we were already packed. Impulsively, we ducked into a downtown restaurant intent on crossing pecan pie off our “to eat” list.

Spacious, almost cavernous, the restaurant was just starting to fill up with the lunch crowd; lawyers, retailers, businessmen, trickling in a few at a time. A waitress took our order almost immediately, and as we sat awaiting our slices of pie, a different waitress waved to us from the far end of the large room. She left her station and rushed over to our table, where, smiling ever so sweetly, she undid the top buttons of her brown, dotted swiss uniform, and after apologizing, “It got wore off a little during the night, but you can still read it,” revealed to me, Terry, nearby diners, and God himself, my name -- slightly smeared but readable as advertised -- across her bare and Texas-proud mammaries.

After that, the pecan pie, while delicious, was kind of an anticlimax. And Terry and I left Texas agreeing that the Beach Boys may have been misled in wishing they all could be “California girls.”

Two nights later, my “product” and I again attracted an overflow crowd. This event was in Los Angeles at Papa Bach’s, a popular independent bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard, and there actually were searchlights. That’s right: searchlights for a book signing. And a line that stretched all the way around the block. The aisles in Papa Bach’s were quite narrow, so once more my signing table was set up outdoors, this time in an alley, more appropriate than they could have known for someone who once lectured on “alley culture.” A flatbed truck was parked a few yards behind me, and atop it a country-rock band was playing. Did I mention that this signing was in L.A.?

The table and chair the bookshop had provided was from its children’s section, comfortable enough but quite low to the ground. The employee managing the line had decreed that the line stop six feet from where I sat. People with copies of
Woodpecker
to be signed were only permitted to approach me one at a time, or two if it was a couple. Because almost everyone wanted a bit of conversation as well as a signature, and because in order to make eye contact with me in my kiddie chair they were forced to squat, it gave the impression that they were kneeling before me.

The bookstore was on my right. On my left was a gas station, in whose parking lot, separated from the alleyway by a high chain-link fence, two or three Mexicans, attracted by the music and those luminous astro tortillas sweeping the sky, were watching with considerable interest. It wasn’t long before there were five or six Mexicans there, and then more than a dozen (the signing lasted four hours), staring at what they must have believed was some sort of high religious figure receiving homage from hundreds of the faithful. But what kind of bishop or saint was this, youngish, with long hair, a big lopsided mustache, wearing a flashy red-and-yellow sweater and fingers full of rings? To compound their perplexity, I would, from time to time, turn, raise my hand to them and genuflect in what by all appearances must have seemed the most heartfelt of blessings. They shook their heads and murmured to one another. Their bewilderment was almost palpable.

Toward the end of the evening, when I turned to “bless” the Hispanic gawkers one last time (by now there must have been twenty of them), I saw, standing in their midst with a grin that could have set off fire alarms all over town, Dr. Timothy Leary.

I’d met Tim Leary briefly during my sojourn in New York fifteen years earlier, but he didn’t recall it and there was no reason why he should: I’d been just a face in the group congratulating him after a lecture at Cooper Union. When he was incarcerated in Folsom, however, a fellow inmate -- Sonny Barger, president of the notorious Northern California chapter of the Hells Angels -- had pressed a copy of
Another Roadside Attraction
in his hands, saying, “This is the Angels’ favorite book.” (So who needs
Kirkus Reviews
?) Tim had also become a fan. I rendezvoused with him that night after the gig at Papa Bach’s and we became friends.

There are those who have condemned Leary as a liar, a sellout, an opportunist, and most of all, a raging egomaniac; but the truth is, he was simply Irish. Like Ken Kesey and Robert Anton Wilson, two other iconically loquacious luminaries of the counterculture, Leary was Irish.
Irish!
He’d kissed the Blarney Stone. He’d French-kissed it, felt it up, rolled with it in the soft grass on the moonlit banks of the River Shannon. Figuratively speaking. Personally, I found him a generous, stimulating, entertaining, always upbeat companion, as full of challenging ideas, sincere flattery, and surprises as blarney. I never once heard him speak ill of anyone, including those who’d set him up and sent him to prison. No, I take that back. He was merciless in his condemnation of Abraham Lincoln, blaming Honest Abe for the rise of Wall Street and corporate fascism in America.

Sitting in his home one afternoon, not long after Tim and his wife Barbara had adopted a huge shaggy dog, I noticed on the coffee table a book entitled
There Are No Bad Dogs, Only Bad Masters.
When Tim was summoned to the phone, I picked up the book and was idly leafing through it, noticing that everywhere it said “no bad dogs,” Tim, with a black pen, had crossed out “dogs” and written in “drugs.” As in there are no bad drugs, only bad users.

Like many of Tim’s more playful pronouncements, this one needed to be rinsed for a while in the suds of sober reason. Certainly, the downfall of the sixties, that era of such promise and hope, was due in no small part to the misuse of potentially “good” drugs -- such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline -- by “bad” imbibers. When
Time
magazine published its cover story on the burgeoning psychedelic revolution, kids from Michigan, Illinois, and New Jersey, from all over blue-collar America; dissatisfied, rebellious kids from broken homes, inept schools, and boring communities, kids who heretofore would have been stealing hubcaps, cadging beers, crashing cars, and getting one another pregnant, flocked to the Haight-Ashbury to become hippies. Their guide to achieving hippiedom, to fitting into this youth-oriented utopia of unbridled freedom and joy, came (usually second- or thirdhand) from
Time
-- and the
Time
article, although generally positive, got it wrong.

For example, one of the ways the early vanguard of psychedelica -- predominately middle class, in its twenties, with at least some college education -- expressed its freedom from social norms, its desire for a more natural lifestyle, was to go barefoot. Well, when you tread city sidewalks without your shoes, your feet get dirty pretty fast.
Time
’s reporters noticed the grimy feet and deduced that these young people, like the beatniks before them, scorned bathing, whereas in point of fact the cliché “your body is your temple” was mouthed consistently in this milieu, whose members bathed ceremoniously, anointed themselves with perfumes and oils, and spent an inordinate amount of time dressing up, choosing their eclectic -- and clean -- costumes with as much care as a debutante selects her ball gowns. The new wave of Rust Belt and breadbasket kids, however, oblivious to the philosophical underpinnings of this movement they were naively embracing, took
Time
magazine at its word and thus the myth of the “dirty hippie” became a reality.

It should go without saying, then, that those same boys and girls lacked completely the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional maturity to gain much beyond anxiety and confusion from psychedelics, and
Time
was apparently incapable of even suggesting (as its older sister
Life
once had) that in the right circumstances and with proper preparation the experience might have been ecstatically revelatory instead. “Good drugs” perhaps, but “bad masters” all around.

On the other hand, friend Timothy to the contrary, I’d submit that there are some drugs that are intrinsically “bad.” There are, as far as I can see, no hidden virtues, no positive potential whatsoever in methamphetamines or crack, and I’d be inclined to include regular cocaine on the cur list, despite the sorry fact that I extolled the virtues of coke, my biggest regret as a novelist, in
Still Life With Woodpecker
. Saturday nights in 1978–1979, my beautiful, smart, witty, and thoroughly mendacious girlfriend Ginny Rose and I would sit at her dining room table in La Conner playing cribbage or Scrabble -- and tooting lines of coke -- until ten-thirty or eleven, then head to the 1890’s Tavern to dance to live music until closing time. I suppose it was because I only tooted once a week, and almost never at parties or in groups, that it took me so long to recognize the hairy truth that cocaine makes smart people stupid and stupid people dangerous. Bad.

Of course, Indians in the Andes have for centuries chewed coca leaves, the mother of cocaine, to relieve hunger pangs and give them needed energy for long treks and hard labor; one example, it seems, of good masters training a bad drug to wag its tail, guard the premises, and refrain from peeing on the rug.

Remembering Timothy Leary now, I’ll contend that even were he wrong about the neutrality of drugs (which sounds uncomfortably close to “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”), even were he guilty of the character flaws attributed to him by his detractors, he still stacks up quite well when compared to those shallow, deluded, boring, self-righteous, and often self-appointed watchdogs who are all too willing, especially if there’s a buck involved, to stand guard at the gates of unauthorized mischief.