Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (31 page)

As for the woman herself, I’ve since had second thoughts. The rehabilitation compound existed for the purpose of teaching domesticated orangutans how to be wild again. Maybe she called men back to the forest to teach them the very same thing.

Despite the bone-gnawed, marrow-sucked skeletons allegedly in their metaphoric closet, the Karo Batak were Harvard-educated Park Avenue socialites compared to the Yellow Leaf People, an elusive nomadic tribe that needs (if it even still exists) no lesson in wildness; so primitive, in fact, it hasn’t even a name for itself. My bride Alexa and I and some fellow travelers (another Sobek excursion) learned of its existence during an overnight stay in the Hmong village of Ban Huai Yuak deep in the hills of northern Thailand, circa 1995.

Fairly primitive itself (no electricity, running water, or motor vehicles), this contingent of Hmong, however, did possess knowledge of the outside world and was warmly hospitable. On the first of our two nights with them, the Hmong staged a welcoming ceremony for us, a production that involved a great deal of very slow, very mannered dancing around a large bonfire, at the conclusion of which they attempted, without much success, to teach us one of the dances. Feeling we should reciprocate, Alexa and I tried to teach them the simplest Western dances we could think of: the Mexican hat dance, and the bunny hop. The result was not pretty. Mentally and physically unable to fit the movements into their frame of reference, they were even more inept at our dances than we’d been at theirs, and that’s why, should you visit the Thai hills today, you’re not likely to find anybody doing the bunny hop.

Early the next morning, a scout arrived in the village with the news that he’d seen a plume of smoke rising from a distant, normally uninhabited valley, a sign, the Hmong believed, that Yellow Leaf People could be in the vicinity. Hurriedly, we formed an expedition that included a villager who’d had some previous success in communicating with the little tribe. How little -- it was estimated that fewer than 150 members were left alive, including two or three groups in Thailand and one in Laos -- it was hard to know. They lived in the forest in temporary lean-tos that they fashioned from sticks and green leaves. When the plucked leaves began to turn yellow -- which normally takes about two weeks -- they would move immediately to a new location and build new shelters, believing it terribly bad luck to sleep beneath dying vegetation. Hence their name.

The Thai government had tried unsuccessfully to assimilate them, Christian missionaries had thrown up their hands and despaired of ever converting them, a resistance that naturally earned my initial respect, although once we were among them (after an arduous hike of several miles up and down a major hill), it was difficult to find much to admire -- except their skill at climbing trees, an activity they performed literally with the speed and agility of monkeys. Despite my interest in mycology, the fungus growing in patches here and there on their bodies held such a minimum of fascination for me I didn’t bother to inquire if it glowed in the dark.

There were perhaps thirty people in this group, only one of whom ever conversed with our guide. We had brought them a slaughtered piglet, which they summarily hacked up with a machete, wrapping the pieces in leaves and tossing them into the fire. When they deemed the meat sufficiently cooked, the pieces were retrieved from the flames and distributed among the members. They offered us none. Neither, in fact, had they thanked us, not even with smiles or gestures, for the gift. They, in fact, had failed to greet us or show surprise when we turned up unannounced, and they did not say good-bye when we departed. I had the impression that once we were out of sight, they would maintain no particular memory of our ever having been there. It was as if they were night clerks at a Charleston hotel and we were all Neil Young.

Because they possessed and utilized those two machetes (gifts from compassionate Hmong), and wore odd pieces of clothing (a faded shirt here, ripped shorts there, foisted on them, surely, by missionaries traumatized by their casual attitude toward nudity), the Yellow Leaf People could not technically qualify as a Stone Age tribe. In all other respects, however, you’d have difficulty picking them out in a Neanderthal lineup. Having neither clocks nor calendars, having no names for the seasons, they live outside of time (though presumably not in a chemically or mystically altered state), a disposition all the more pronounced by their lack of a functional numerical system: they count only up to three. And not only do they not have a name for their tribe, individual members have no names either. Moreover, in their language there are no words for “I,” “me,” “my,” or “mine,” which puts them in bold, stark, dramatic contrast to another tribe with which I’d mingled at the Academy Awards in Hollywood four years earlier.

In 1991, I’d escorted Debra Winger to the Oscars. Debra was a presenter that year, so we had privileged seats; one row, in fact, behind Kevin Costner, who won the ’91 Best Actor award for
Dances With Wolves
; and afterward we made the rounds of the parties, including Swifty Lazar’s “A-list” shindig at Spago. It was wall-to-wall celebrities (I’ve never been so hard to see), but while a big ego may be as necessary for a film star as a space suit for an astronaut, in comparing Hollywood actors unfavorably to Yellow Leaf People regarding their usage of the first-person singular, I hadn’t meant to imply that the players with whom I socialized that long, long evening were all annoying narcissists. In truth, I had engaging conversations with the likes of Sean Penn (whom I’d met previously) and Michael J. Fox; and as it turned out, it was my own ego that caused me difficulty, put me in some danger, and nearly spoiled my night among the stars.

Following the ceremony, there was a dinner backstage for the nominees, presenters, and entertainers. Ranks of tables had been set up in the surprisingly voluminous space, each table accommodating six persons. At my table there was seated, besides Debra and me, Al Pacino and his date (a British fashion model), and the character actor Danny Aiello (a lovely man) and his wife. The dinner was sponsored by Revlon, and at each place setting there was a gift: Revlon cosmetics for the women, Revlon cologne for the men. There was a considerable amount of table hopping: “Schmooze More, Eat Less” seemed the slogan for the dinner. Being invisible in this milieu, I remained seated, though, alas, not entirely subdued.

At one point, only Pacino, his date, and I were left at the table. Either because he was bored, wished to amuse his date, or both, Pacino, who’d removed his tuxedo jacket, sprinkled some cologne onto his hand and began dabbing it demonstratively in his armpits. Reacting as if this were a challenge, and not to be upstaged by Al Pacino (never mind that he was among the finest actors of his generation), I poured a finger of cologne into my water glass, toasted him and gulped it down. I failed to register Pacino’s reaction. I was too busy dying.

Seriously, I thought I’d killed myself. Unable to breathe, let alone utter so much as a gasp or a squeak, I sat there frozen, tears streaming, waiting in terror for everything to fade to black. How long I remained immobilized in airless panic, I cannot say; it was probably no more than ten or twelve seconds, but it seemed the length of an Ingmar Bergman double feature in Swedish without subtitles. When finally I could breathe again (thank you, God!), I tried to act blasé, not even glancing around, after wiping my eyes, to see who, aside from Pacino and friend, might have witnessed my performance.

As I look back on the scene, it seems a reenactment of those early episodes in which young Tommy Rotten would drink ink, topical antiseptic, and stringent household products intended for scouring. I’ve joked that I was born thirsty, but (not to put too fine a point on it), I think in reality I was born
curious
. It’s likely that many, if not most, of my adventures and misadventures, on the page and off, have been simply an attempt to feel more fully the sensation of being alive. Ironically, the quest for aliveness can sometimes put one in closer proximity to death, whether one is barreling down a crocodile-infested African river or asphyxiating in glittery Hollywood on a mouthful of Revlon cologne.

36

the good, the bad & the goofy

There are, as I’ve suggested, sticky situations, particularly those for which one has volunteered, that, for all the risk involved, are ultimately exhilarating, even life-enhancing. Then there are others, usually unbidden, that are merely creepy, and although one survives them, one feels violated by them, they leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth, and I’m not referring to cologne. Here are examples of both.

One night in Namibia, twenty or so wild elephants wandered into our camp. More specifically, they commenced to mill about in the clump of acacia trees in which Alexa and I (hoping to keep a quiet distance from Big Jim Pleyte and his snores) had pitched our little tan tent. Our guide assured us that if we’d just slip ever so quietly into the tent and go to sleep, we’d be safe. Well, after dinner we did manage to get into the tent unnoticed, crawling ever so stealthily the last few yards on our hands and knees. Sleeping, however, was another matter entirely.

“Elephants,” the guide told us, “have tender feet. If you notice the way they walk, especially on unfamiliar terrain, they set each foot down very, very carefully. They’re wary of stepping on a sharp stone or a sharp stick or thorns or something, so they’re not gonna want to step on your tent.” Well and good. What he neglected to tell us was that elephants feed sixteen hours a day (which is two hours more than I feed). All night long, separated from us only by a thin sheet of canvas, the big beasts tore limbs off of trees, munched loudly on bunches of acacia leaves, snorted, belched, and expelled big boom-boom pachyderm farts. (Yes, children, elephants do it, too.) Sleep?

Moreover, while the guide didn’t exactly dwell on it, it was made lucidly clear that should either of us venture outside the tent -- say, to take a photograph or a pee -- our too, too mortal flesh would likely be resembling the payload of fifty jelly doughnuts. And yet . . . and yet, rather than fret or bitch about our sleepless and potential fatal situation, we lay there in a state of prolonged elation, feeling more alive, more attuned to the rise and fall of the cosmic pumpkin (so to speak), than we’d ever felt at, say, a rock concert, a Fellini film, a New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, or (it should go without saying) a political rally. We were intoxicated on what Thoreau called “the tonic of wildness,” the base yet mysterious rightness of the natural world.

I’d experienced something similar a couple of years earlier when, during two weeks on the Rufiji River in Tanzania, our rubber rafts survived twelve separate charges by twelve different hippos, believed to be the most dangerous animal in Africa. The hippopotamus is a vegetarian but ferociously territorial (you might find that true of certain vegans you know), and will flip a raft or bite it in half: once one is in the water, the crocodiles show up like a bunch of starving hobos descending on a boxcar full of fried chicken.

When a hippo charged a raft, a guide who, except in a rapids, always stood in the rear of the craft, would slap the water with his oar, and since that area of Tanzania was totally devoid of human habitation, the unfamiliar sound of an oar
swack!
would startle the beast and momentarily slow it down. Meanwhile, we six paddlers, three on each side, would dig in and paddle as if our lives depended on it, which was certainly not out of the question. Once we had safely exited that particular hippo’s domain, we would relax, wipe our brows, and panting, revel in the primeval drama of it all. Occasionally, though, we’d leave the riverine realm of one nasty hippo and before we’d had a moment to rejoice or reflect, immediately intrude on the territory of an equally possessive fierce fat boy. But that’s another story.

There’s a sense in which Hollywood Boulevard is a river, too: and until fairly recently it was a river of celebrity, make-believe, neon, and sleaze; infested with tourists, hustlers, weirdos, petty crooks -- and the LAPD. One early evening in the mid-1980s, my agent, Phoebe Larmore, and I were traveling along this Mississippi of misfits (by then the only stars there were the bronze ones embedded in the sidewalk), when as we paused for a red light, a young man came rushing out of nowhere and tried to yank open the door of the passenger side, my side, of our car. I managed to hold the door shut and lock it, but when the light went green and we pulled slowly away (there was traffic), the guy ran alongside the car, yelling and pounding on the door.

I suggested, rather pointedly, to Phoebe that she turn at the next corner, which she did, taking a right, driving a block, then turning left on Yucca Street, a quieter street that runs parallel to Hollywood. Looking back, we saw that our assailant was gone, we’d lost him. But then . . . but then we heard sirens, close by, and suddenly all around us there began to flash the frantic, no-nonsense red lights of crisis and alarm: authority’s monochrome rainbow. A police car was blocking our progress now, and two more squad cars were right on our tail, blaring and blinking. When we stopped, an amplified voice ordered us both out of the vehicle, ordered us each to raise our arms, ordered us to place our hands on our heads. Hello?

In less than a minute, we were literally up against a wall with three revolvers and a shotgun pointed at us by cops with their fingers on the triggers. There is no beast in any jungle, no rapids on any river (including the lower Zambezi in Zimbabwe, where some of the troughs were so deep and the waves so high that there were moments when the river was actually
above
our raft), no outdoor adventure that could come close to generating this level of fear.

The cops took turns firing questions -- and insults -- at us (preferable to bullets, obviously) and at some point in the tone-tough verbal barrage, we learned that two men matching our description (Phoebe had recently gotten an unusually short haircut and the cops were in doubt about her sex, an honest mistake on Hollywood Boulevard), two men had grabbed a woman’s handbag outside a bar and driven away with it. Apparently, the guy who attacked our car was a self-appointed vigilante trying to recover the purse and apprehend the thieves. I guess he hadn’t had time to duck into a phone booth and change into his superhero suit.

We tried to explain to the cops that I was a well-known author, she my agent, but it was a story they were reluctant to buy. “In that fuckin’ jalopy?” Phoebe’s nice car was in her neighborhood repair shop, the owner of which had loaned her a vehicle, a bit of a beater, for a day or two. The three pistols and the shotgun (it must take a lot of firepower to bring down a purse snatcher) remained leveled at us. Then, slower than a bullet but sufficiently speedy to alter the ambience, something occurred to me. “I’m in
People
magazine this week,” I blurted, not really meaning to boast.

Not only was it the truth, but the issue had just come out: we’d picked up a copy at a pharmacy that very afternoon. And, it was lying on the front seat of the car. I convinced the gendarmes to allow me, covered every step of the way, to open the door and produce the magazine. Voilà! They surveyed the article, a three-page feature, as meticulously as if it were a crime scene, comparing the photos to my in-person countenance and the name in the story to my personal ID. Finally, with what seemed like genuine disappointment (I almost felt sorry for them), they lowered their guns.

At no time, however, did they apologize for needlessly endangering our lives (one slip of a trigger finger . . .), although they did grow rather jocular once the cops-and-robbers game was over. “We saw Uncle Milty earlier this evening,” announced one, referring to Milton Berle and what for him was now a two-celebrity shift; not bad for a patrolman who’d missed out on the Beverly Hills and Malibu beats.

I have friends and acquaintances who sneer at
People
magazine, ridiculing the sensationalized attention the publication pays to the heartbreaks and high jinks of film starlets and television actors: the comely, the callow, the craven, and the confused. Perhaps, but
People
has not only been kind to me and my books, it saved me from a still more prolonged interaction with gunmen of the LAPD, a most direful prospect already proven to offer none of the romantic nor transcendental rewards one receives when outrunning angry hippos or bedding down amidst a herd of wild elephants.

There are highlights and low points in the book-flogging arena, as well. An example of the high was the day I was mobbed by teenage girls in Sydney, Australia. Of the low: the night I laid an egg on the Jon Stewart show.

More of my novels are sold in Australia (
Villa Incognito
was number one on the bestseller list there) than in any country outside of the U.S., including Canada. My impression is that the Australian sensibility is generally more Americanized than is Canada’s, which, if true, must suit Canadians just fine. At any rate, I’d been dispatched Down Under (where the sesame seeds are all on the
other
side of the crackers), and one of my reading and signing events was a midday affair at the main branch of the Sydney Public Library. There was a girls’ school nearby and a contingent of thirty or forty juniors and seniors with a chaperone or two showed up to hear me read.

After the reading, I was escorted to a somewhat smaller first-floor room at the rear of the library and seated behind a long, very heavy wooden table. My mission there was to wallop with my barbaric scribble the flyleaves of purchased copies of my oeuvre. Normally, readers wishing signatures will line up and approach the author one or two at a time. These girls, however, were as wild as dingos. They rushed the table in a disorganized pack, waving books in the air like Meryl Streep’s Outback baby. It was hectic but rather entertaining in its way, and it went well enough until my handler from Bantam signaled that I needed to depart for the radio station where she’d scheduled an “important” interview. There was, in fact, a taxi, its motor running, waiting for me right outside the back door.

When I stood and the girls realized that I was preparing to leave them, all hell broke loose. Waving unsigned books or autograph pads in the air -- some had nothing to sign and seemed only to want to touch me -- they surged forward with such force that I was literally pinned to the wall by that hefty table. It felt as if the table edge was obstructing my air supply and cutting me in half. I glanced around the room for help, but none was forthcoming. Even Alexa, my loving wife, only grinned and rolled her eyes. Well, I thought, there are worse ways to die.

Summoning all my strength, I managed to shove back the table far enough so that I could wriggle up onto it, where I stood for an instant before taking a deep breath and jumping down into the roiling mass of girl flesh. Grabbing first one girl and then another, I kissed them (sometimes on the cheek, sometimes on the nose, sometimes on the top of the head: it was all very scattershot); and hugging and kissing, made my way to the door and escaped to the taxi. As we pulled away, I waved good-bye, then sat back in a daze. I felt as if I’d awakened from a particularly crazy, bed-rumpling dream. I felt like a Beatle. I felt like the Beatles, all five of them, including Mr. Epstein. I felt like the luckiest writer in the world.

The Jon Stewart show was, as the saying goes, a horse of a different feather, although there was nobody and nothing to blame but me and my naïveté. In my foolish innocence, I hadn’t realized that the banter between hosts and guests on late-night TV --
all
late-night TV -- is to some degree scripted. The day prior to my appearance on the show, its producer had interviewed me for nearly ninety minutes via telephone in my New York hotel room. Mainly, she quizzed me about my LSD experiences and, as also reported in
USA Today
that week, my “habit” of buying tattoos for female acquaintances. (True, I’d purchased tattoos for several women including an Olympic athlete, but this was before tattoos had become so trendy that every girl next door and her baby sister were inked up like Chinese scrolls; and besides, I was only encouraging their rebellious spirit, not branding them.) My misguided impression was that the producer was just feeling me out, trying to get a sense of my style and personality.

The next night, I went on the show percolating with uncharacteristic confidence. Man, I was
feeling
it! I was loaded for the proverbial bear, ready to match Stewart ad lib for ad lib, wit for wit. And, of course, to talk at some length about my new novel. This was the old Jon Stewart show, the one on CBS, the network that had recently canceled
Pee-wee’s Playhouse
and fired its star for the sort of intimate in-the-dark activity that no child alive would fail to identify with or understand. A fan of Mr. Herman, I, as soon as I walked onstage, embarked on a monologue defending Pee-wee and lightheartedly scolding CBS. It got a good laugh from the studio audience, but Jon Stewart, a celebrated iconoclast, looked a trifle perplexed.

Once I was seated in the hot seat, Stewart commenced to question me. He asked about my LSD experiences. He asked about tattooing girls. Hello? The questions obviously had been fed to him by the producer. I answered briefly, almost tersely, hoping to move right along to a discussion of my novel, which was, as far as I was concerned, my reason for being on the show. Well, it never happened. Dissatisfied (and who can blame them?) with my short, less than pithy responses, they not only politely ushered me off the set at the next commercial break, they never paid me the modest union minimum stipend that all guests customarily receive for appearing on shows of this type.

Friends who have appeared on
David Letterman
and
The Tonight Show
tell me it’s standard procedure for a TV host to be briefed in some detail by his producers regarding topics for on-air conversation. It makes sense, I see that now, but it’s a little late. I’m not likely to turn up on another such program. Unless, maybe, it’s hosted by teenage girls from Australia.