Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (29 page)

Still Life With Woodpecker
caused me to be investigated by the FBI. Not right away, however, and certainly not for the rosy picture that I (in my own naïveté) painted of cocaine: it’s the substances that enlarge consciousness and open the mind’s eye that worry our government, not the ones that draw down the blinds. No, fifteen years after the publication of
Woodpecker
-- a novel that examines the difference between outlaws and criminals, between redheads and the rest of us, but whose primary focus is the transitory nature of romantic love and what might be done about love’s vagaries -- fifteen years after its debut, the book led me to be considered a suspect in the Unibomber case.

When someone from the Seattle office of the FBI telephoned one Thursday in 1995 to say that the agency wished to question me, I knew immediately, though no reason was given, what it was about. I knew because a month earlier, a newspaper reporter in Connecticut had contacted me to report that a college professor in that state was telling law enforcement agencies that it was obvious, from what Tom Robbins had written in
Still Life With Woodpecker
 -- the anti-authoritarian sentiments, the warnings against overdependence on technology, the romanticizing of outlaws, and, most tellingly, authentic recipes for homemade bombs -- that he (me) was the Unibomber, subject of a nationwide manhunt. The journalist thought it amusing, considering both the humor and passionate reverence for life that also permeate the novel, and I myself paid it little mind until the Bureau phoned. Even then I wasn’t troubled, and pleasantly agreed to receive an agent at my La Conner home on the following Tuesday. But then . . .

But then, the very next morning, as synchronicity (that boundary-busting logic-mocking clown) would have it, Susan Paynter, a columnist for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
published in her Friday column the widely circulated drawing of the Unibomber in his hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses, juxtaposed with a recent head shot of me -- in a hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses. The resemblance was hard to miss. “Could our Tom Robbins,” she wrote, “who wouldn’t hurt a fly, be the infamous Unibomber?” Susan, who knew me, meant it as a joke, but I assumed they weren’t laughing very hard down at the FBI.

My assumption was correct. All that weekend, day and night, an unfamiliar dark sedan was parked in the one spot that would have permitted its occupant an unobscured view of both the front and rear exits of my house. Had I emerged with a suitcase or a backpack, it wouldn’t have been long before some guy in black shoes was reading me my Miranda rights, and not smiling when I asked if those rights granted me permission to wear fruit on my head like Carmen. Surveillance can be boring, however, for both observer and observed, and by Monday I wasn’t even checking to see if I was still being watched.

On Tuesday, without once asking for directions, the agents arrived at my door. Two of them. Young. Female. Attractive. The FBI isn’t stupid, they knew my weakness. And the agents knew I now knew they knew. That established, we settled in for a lengthy chat, during which they never once intimated that I, myself, was under suspicion, but were only hoping that I could provide them with leads to follow up on. Leads such as any fan mail I might have received from a reader who’d professed, perhaps in the Unibomber’s prose style (he’d published extremely long missives in the
New York Times),
an inordinate admiration for my Woodpecker character and his habit of punctuating social commentary with dynamite. Leads such as my source for those unusual explosive recipes (the bomb made from kiddie breakfast cereal, for example) that I’d included in the novel.

Entirely professional, the women raised not a pretty eyebrow when I answered that, alas, I’d hauled an accumulation of answered fan mail to the county landfill only a week before, and that, sorry, I couldn’t remember the name of the Seattle sound-system engineer who through an intermediary (also forgotten) had passed along those instructions for turning common household products into things that go boom in the night. I was certain, however, that I could detect something subtle, unspoken, pass between them when I unwittingly volunteered that I’d physically demolished the electric typewriter on which I’d begun composing
Still Life With Woodpecker
and had gone back to writing with a pen, an obvious Unibomber-like retaliation against technology. And then when I asked them where they were from and they both said Chicago, I’d blurted out that I’d spent time in the Chicago area myself. True enough, it was where I’d once attended weather school, but it was also where the Unibomber posted most of his deadly packages.

For whatever Tommy Rotten reason, I was doing a pretty good job of incriminating myself, in addition to which I caught the agents on several occasions eyeing the nutty, cartoonish assemblage of sticks and twine I’d constructed to support a tall, spindly yucca plant in my studio, a contraption that could have led a suspicious mind to equate it with the jerry-built devices the Unibomber mailed to his intended victims. When the fed femmes left that day, I was convinced I’d not seen the last of them, and something perverse in me was actually excited by the prospect, by the drama of it all.

When months passed without a word from my agents, I went so far as to telephone their office in Seattle to inquire how the investigation was going. I just couldn’t help it. A dead-robotic voice informed me that the agent I sought did not work there. I asked for the other woman and got a similar response. No explanation was offered. Curious. Very curious, indeed. Who were those women, then? Who was their actual employer? What did they really want from me? My imagination, that infernal pinball machine, lit up and I had a truckload of quarters.

Then, around Christmas, I received a holiday card from one of the agents, the one with whom I would have flirted more openly had it not seemed somehow in poor taste. She wrote that she and her sister investigator had been transferred to Oklahoma City to work on the federal-building bombing case there. I wrote back but she never responded -- and eventually the Unibomber was caught and I ran out of quarters.

35

a fool for wonder

In the years since the selling of
Still Life With Woodpecker,
I’ve finally had the wherewithal to indulge, pretty much at will and in relative comfort, those urges kindled by that world atlas I bought at age eight. When I wasn’t absorbed with writing (including research, editing, and some publisher-generated promotion); and/or extracurricular activities such as reading for pleasure, attending movies, following the Sonics, playing organized volleyball, practicing yoga and Pilates, and periodically running away with Cupid’s circus (knowing full well I’d probably end up selling peanuts or watering the elephants), I was off to foreign lands in pursuit of fresh experiences: cultural, culinary, or simply thrilling (such as the African treks or the white-water rafting I’ve enjoyed on three continents).

My wife Alexa, the wisest person I know, says that all those pursuits of mine, including the love of words and the loving of women -- and certainly not excluding my involvement with psychedelic drugs and Tibetan/Zen “crazy wisdom” philosophies -- have been part and parcel of the same overriding compulsion: a lifelong quest to personally interface with the Great Mystery (which may or may not be God) or, at the very least, to further expose myself to wonder. I’m prepared neither to argue with that observation nor advance it; any reader who’s so motivated can draw his or her own conclusion. My immediate intention is to say a little something about Cuba.

I traveled to Cuba in 1978, partly because it was forbidden (no American had legally set foot there in about twenty years), partly because I wished to see for myself how much of the official picture the U.S. painted of our small island neighbor was just Cold War propaganda. (A fair amount, as it turned out.) I could not honestly say that the Great Mystery was in any way involved, although I did, after an evening of dancing at the fabled Tropicana nightclub, make love with a vacationing French Canadian schoolteacher during a ferocious Caribbean storm, and there was definitely a transcendent presence in the room. Forget Barry White, Percy Sledge, Mantovani, and Sinatra; forget romantic mood music of any genre: nothing surpasses crackling lightning, apocalyptic thunder, thrashing palm fronds (Aphrodite fanning the ozone), and hard-driving torrents of rain as inspirational background audio for a night of tropical love.

Upon learning that there were regular flights from Canada to Cuba, I’d phoned my friend James Lee Stanley and convinced him to join in the escapade. He canceled a few gigs (James Lee is a singer/songwriter), we booked a fifteen-day excursion, and a month later flew from Montreal to Havana on a Russian airliner. On the hour-long bus ride from José Martí Airport to the small, funky seaside resort which was to be our headquarters during our visit, our hosts passed around bottles of rum, and it wasn’t long before James Lee had his guitar out and we all -- Cubans, Canadians, and us two Americans -- were singing “Guantanamera.” We were already having fun, and I hadn’t met the schoolteacher yet.

James Lee and I, in fact, had rambunctious fun the entire time we spent in Cuba, which set us apart from the many Russians there and endeared us to the natives. In those years, Cuba was the Soviet Union’s Hawaii. If, for example, Ivan’s section of a Russian tractor factory met or exceeded its production quota, Ivan and his family might be awarded a holiday in a tropical paradise. Just how paradisiacal Ivan found Cuba, however, was open to question. The Russians would not even attempt Latin dances, they eschewed local rum in favor of their own vodka, and when besotted would sit around teary-eyed, singing old mournful nationalistic songs. You’d see a busload of them on their way to the beach and from their expressions you’d think they were being shipped to a gulag. In private, Cubans -- a warm, ebullient people who love love love to dance -- mocked the Russians, referring to them as “square heads.”

What became apparent during our visit is that ordinary Cubans were deeply grateful to the Soviet government for its assistance in a time of need, but were somewhat contemptuous of the Russian people. Conversely, they despised the American government but maintained a genuine fondness for individual Americans. That dichotomy is easy to understand if you know anything about Cuban history and America’s long record of oppressive behavior toward the island, but I shan’t get into that here. I will say that while I came away with sympathy, even admiration for Cuba, my favorable impression did not extend to its socialist economy, whose austerity and uniformity was itself oppressive. The conspicuous consumption in capitalist countries such as ours is deadening to the soul, but an absence of variety and choice can be psychically impoverishing, as well.

The lone pizza parlor in Havana did not sell beer, although it would have been entirely legal to do so. In no beer garden could you buy a snack. When you hailed a taxi, the driver would pick you up only if he happened to be going in the direction you wished to go. The cabbie earned the same amount each day regardless of how many fares he picked up, the merchant’s profits increased not a peso when he moved more product than expected. Was the average citizen happy with this rigid and prescribed arrangement? Despite his or her fierce (and understandable) pride in the 1959 revolution that overthrew the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista and evicted the U.S. businessmen and Mafia dons who supported him, I suspected not. Secretly, when they felt they could trust James Lee and me, the Cubans we’d befriended would plead with us to somehow get them cassette players, radios, rock albums, or blue jeans.

There are things in this world -- even material things -- that supersede politics, exhilarating things that support a personal liberation of the spirit; and on a crude, unevolved level may even represent a longing to connect to the Mystery.

Suzette from Quebec notwithstanding, my most cherished memory of Cuba stems from an occasion of mechanical and linguistic miscarriage. A party from the gringo resort was off on a day trip to the Bay of Pigs when our vintage bus stalled near the center of a small town. It was midday, hotter than the fiddles of hell, and having no luck in restarting the engine, our driver urged us to get off the bus and find a place, if we could, in the shade. We huddled beneath a lone tree in the square, preparing for a long wait as he tinkered with the engine. We should have known there would be bad juju associated with the Bay of Pigs.

James Lee retrieved his guitar and commenced to strum, even to quietly sing a little. Up to that point, the town had seemed unoccupied. There wasn’t a soul or a sole in the square, the surrounding houses showed no sign of current human habitation. Someone suggested that Castro had drafted the entire population to go cut sugarcane, someone else dismissed that as U.S. propaganda. James Lee continued to play. And slowly, very slowly, one by one -- kids first, then adults -- people came out of their homes and drifted into the square. It was as if James Lee was an immobile Pied Piper.

James played louder. People drew closer. And before long there was an impromptu fiesta in progress: literally dozens of people singing along, mostly to interminable renditions of “Guantanamera,” the one song to which all present knew the words. Obviously, we weren’t Russian, but it took a while before James and I were identified as Americans, for many, if not most of them, had never encountered an American. They knew some rock and roll, however, having listened clandestinely and at considerable risk to Miami radio stations. And they knew Chiclets. Man, did they know Chiclets. Somewhere -- if only in their mythology -- they’d come into contact with the tiny pellets of candy-coated chewing gum and automatically associated them with America. The land of the free and the home of the Chiclets. Chiclets and stripes forever!

Hesitant to interrupt James Lee -- in Cuba you don’t mess with the music -- kids surrounded me, just pleading for Chiclets. Now I knew practically no Spanish, and much of what I did know was from a Tex-Mex idiom not widely understood in Cuba -- but I’d seen handmade signs in California shop windows that read
SE HABLA ESPANOL,
a statement I always took to mean “We have Spanish,” as in “We have command of the Spanish language.” For years, I’d been confusing
habla
with the verb
haber,
“to have,” when in actuality,
hablar
is the verb “to speak.” So when I kept protesting to the young Cubans, enunciating clearly so they wouldn’t misinterpret,
“No habla Chiclets,”
what I was really saying was “I don’t speak Chiclets.”

Well, it was an honest statement: I did not speak Chiclets. Later, however, when I came to realize why the Cubans had been regarding me as if I were some kind of Yankee nut job, I had to ask myself, “Why not?” Trying to imagine what Chiclets might sound like, I began to teach myself a basic Chiclet lexicon. You know, the essential phrases. I still recall a few (they sound like passages from
Beowulf
being recited by cartoon mice), but can only pronounce them after I’ve consumed four or more Cuba libres.

Linguistically versatile if far from fluent, I can goof up any number of languages and with varying results. The first time I dined alone in Paris, for instance, I made a mistake that conceivably could have gone in my favor.

Perusing the menu at Polidor, my favorite affordable restaurant in that city of magnificent and expensive places to eat, I thought that the veal in a cream sauce sounded good. However, when the drastically cute waitress came to take my order, I mistakenly asked not for
veau en crème
but
vous en crème,
and it took me a moment before I understood that I’d told her that I wanted
her
in cream.

Of course, that was what I really wanted. Like
no habla Chiclets,
it was a truthful statement, and Freud, bless his heart, would have immediately recognized it as such. The waitress, being French, simply took it in stride. With neither a giggle nor a blush, she wrote down my order and brought me the veal. It was delicious, but having now comprehended my error and fantasized about the potential result, I couldn’t help but feel a wee bit cheated.

Linguistic malfunctions involving chewable and edible substances are not limited to peasants such as I. Consider John F. Kennedy on a historic day in Germany in 1963.

Among the confections favored by sweet-toothed
Deutschen
is a jelly-filled pastry they call the Berliner. Now, in the German language, articles of speech (such as “a,” “an,” “the,” etc.) are never placed in front of nationalities or other nouns that identify persons according to their place of origin, although articles, quite naturally, are placed in front of pastries. Thus, there are waggish grammarians who insist that when President Kennedy -- shod in hand-tooled leather shoes, a fine Harvard cravat about his neck -- buttoned himself into a heavy black cashmere-and-wool topcoat, stepped from a bulletproof limousine onto a privileged podium, and with dignity, passion, and compassion announced his solidarity with a beleaguered city by intoning,
“Ich bin ein Berliner,”
what he actually said was, “I am a jelly doughnut.”

There are others -- mostly earnest liberals -- who argue that this interpretation is merely an attempt to besmirch the reputation of a great statesman. I contend it’s nothing of the sort. From my perspective, in fact, the opposite is true. I’ve had occasion now to lug my taste buds all over the planet, exposing them to dishes ranging from the sublime -- foie gras mousse in a brown morel sauce (Paris), and warm zabaglione with fresh wild strawberries (Rome), to the challenging -- snow-frog fat in custard (Hong Kong), and red ant larva (northern Thailand). In all my gastronomic globe-trotting, however, I cannot honestly say that any food item, with the possible exception of a perfect tomato sandwich, has had a greater impact on my palate and my eye or generated richer, more varied imagerial associations than the jelly doughnut, that plump pastry Pantheon, that unbroken circle, that holy tondo, that doughy dome of heaven, that female breast swollen with sweetness, that globe of glorious goo, that secret round nest of the scarlet-throated calorie warbler, that sun whose rays so ignite the proletariat palate, that hub of the wheel of sustenance, that vampire cookie gorged with gore, that clown in an army overcoat, that fat fried egg with a crimson yoke, that breakfast moon, that bulging pocket, that strawberry alarm clock, that unicorn turd, that jewel pried from the head of a greasy idol (a ruby as big as the Ritz), that Homeric oculus (blind yet all-seeing), that orb, that pod, that crown, that womb, that knob, that bulb, that bowl, that grail, that . . . well, you get the picture.

Whether consciously or subliminally, JFK could not have identified himself with a more wide-ranging, democratically inclusive sustenance than a jelly doughnut. How might it have affected his legacy, not to mention world peace, had he proclaimed
“Ich bin ein Kraut”
(I am a cabbage) or
“Ich bin ein Kartoffelpuffer”
(I am a potato pancake) instead?

As I may have made clear in these confessions (luckily for the reader, and me, as well, Chiclets isn’t a written language), I’ve never been accused of gastronomic timidity. In recent years, I have become increasingly disinclined to partake of morsels intimately connected to deceased members of the animal kingdom, but I can recall only once in my travels when I shied away from an opportunity to sample exotic fare in an exotic setting. That occurred when I was invited to sup with my subjects (that’s right,
subjects
) on the day I reigned (I’m not joking) as King of the Cannibals.

I was in northwestern Sumatra with a small group -- eight paying river rafters, four guides from Sobek/Mountain Travel (the California-based adventure company), and an English-speaking Indonesian forest ranger who spent his downtime reading Louis L’Amour cowboy novels -- intent on becoming the second party to ever run the Alas, a remote river that cuts through the largest expanse of tropical rain forest left in Asia; a dense jungle, home to orangutans, rhinos, and tigers, and perpetually threatened by Japanese timber companies.