Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

To begin with, it traveled with but two live animals. Considering the cruelty to which many circus animals have been subjected, that could be judged two too many, although this unlikely pair — a half-grown elephant, and an unusually large parrot — seemed robust.

As for human beings, there were in the entire company exactly seven: four men, three women. Three of the men were roustabouts: workers who put up the tent and did the heavy lifting. The other man (he might have been the owner) served as ringmaster, played the organ, and at one point performed what passed for a trapeze act. Middle-aged, with a beer belly, he struggled mightily to swing in a complete loop. As he perspired, huffed, puffed, and turned rooster red, my girlfriend and I surely weren’t alone in fearing we were about to witness a medical emergency. “The Greatest Heart Attack on Earth.” He persisted valiantly, however, and eventually managed to flip all the way over. The applause he received was motivated more by relief than admiration.

Sometimes solo, occasionally in pairs, once in triplicate, the women assumed a variety of roles: acrobats, tumblers, balancers, contortionists, jugglers, elephant trainers, ropedancers, etc. What’s interesting is that each time a performer left the tent, she returned with a different name. For one act, a woman might be announced as “the fabulous Madame Yvonne”; the next time she entered the ring she would be “the amazing Madame Dianne.” There was Madame Natasha, Madame Sophie, Madame Elena, and so on, as if spectators might actually come to believe there were dozens of them. Each female performer wore multiple identities — but always the same tights. And virtually every pair of tights had runs in it!

This raises the question: does a woman in pink circus tights hold all the secrets of the universe if her tights have runs in them? The answer I think is emphatically “yes!” — although I wouldn’t go so far as to declare it a prerequisite.

The multitasking and name-changing; the frayed, unraveling tights; the effort and exuberance exhibited in an obviously distressed show whose performances might easily have been perfunctory and forlorn, was endearing enough, but what broke the needle on my charm meter was the grand finale. Picture this:

Spotlit and sparkling, a spinning mirrored disco ball is slowly raised to the top of the darkened tent. As it ascends, a live parrot, twirling round and round, is hanging from the ball by its beak. And all the while an organ, fully amplified, all stops out, a panting, red-faced ringmaster at its keyboard, is playing “The Impossible Dream.” Ta da!

Well, I guess you had to be there. I’ve attended many a circus, major and minor, in America and abroad; seen many a performance, thrilling and routine, but it is the one just described — kind of cheesy, sort of dumb, falling so audaciously and yet so sweetly on the far side of reason — that will forever occupy the center ring in my heart.

Incidentally, the following morning I stopped by the market and asked for the poster, wishing to add it to my meager collection of circus memorabilia. The poster wasn’t there. According to a clerk, someone from the show had picked it up earlier so that it could be displayed in another town. Turns out, this circus with one elephant and one parrot also had only one poster.

A silk scarf is smoothed out upon a flat metal plate. A frying pan is placed atop the scarf. An egg is cracked and dropped in the pan. The egg fries, soon cooked to perfection, although there was no flame and the scarf does not burn or even scorch. My father was among tens of thousands who watched in astonishment this demonstration in one of the science pavilions at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933.

Long after his buddies had left the pavilion, perhaps to check out Sally Rand’s scandalous “fan dance,” my father lingered behind, observing the confounding demonstration several more times. By the time he got home to Blowing Rock, he’d figured out how it worked.

The device was an early prototype of the microwave oven, though nobody used that term in 1933; and Daddy proceeded to build one just like the one he’d seen in Chicago. Not surprisingly, it attracted attention from miles around. People kept showing up at the electric company offices, pleading to see the trick. Daddy’s friends urged him to charge admission, but he declined, having not a grain of greed in his gullet. For his family, he was always a “good provider,” as they say, but he had scant interest in money per se. He soon gave the device to an associate, who, charging the curious ten cents apiece to see it in action, enjoyed a nice little sideline before the primitive microwave sputtered one day and ran out of magic. His friend might have persuaded Daddy to rebuild it, but it was summer, hens had quit laying, and the price of eggs was cutting into profits.

George T. Robbins dropped out of school in the eighth grade. At eighteen, he went to work as a lineman, climbing poles for the regional electrical utility. By the time he was fifty, the homemade microwave long since forgotten, he was a division manager for Virginia Electric Power Company. At VEPCO, there were 250 electrical engineers working under him, and colleagues said that he knew all of them. A kind of natural genius in his field (a couple of his inventions remain in use today), he surely would have risen to an even higher executive position were it not for the fact that he talked like a character from the Li’l Abner comic strip. In elocution and grammar, he never transcended his lack of formal education or his hillbilly roots.

For whatever reason, the electrician gene, the carpenter gene, the mechanic gene, all so dominant in my father, are totally recessive in me. My whole life I’ve been bored to within an inch of rigor mortis by the very sight of a slide rule; likewise a screwdriver, unless, of course, we’re talking orange juice and vodka. I have, however, found ways to override my lack of talent for — and total disinterest in — the role of handyman.

For example, I once owned a secondhand 1969 Mercury Montego convertible, which, by the time I gave it to a relative, was showing an excess of two hundred thousand miles on its odometer. This car ran like Joan Rivers, on and on, defying detractors, requiring no repairs beyond the cosmetic, leaving newer models in its dust. Its extreme durability I attributed to the fact that in all the years I owned the vehicle, I never looked under its hood. Not even once. Rather, I imagined (and visualized) that in place of an engine, there was a ball of mystic white light under there that kept the car going. And going. And going.

Only recently it occurred to me that I might successfully apply this strategy to my own body. Avoiding intrusive medical tests, and disavowing the presence of oozy organs, fetid tubes, and yards of slimy coils, I’ve begun to picture my abdominal cavity occupied instead by a single glowing globe, a radiant mandala, a holy pearl of purest ray serene. How’s it working? So far so good — although I haven’t yet canceled my health insurance.

Everybody’s heard a fish story: two bass on one hook, an ancient trout that outwits generations of anglers, a biblical putz swallowed by a whale, the ubiquitous big one that got away. Ultimately, however, there’s only one fish story, as persistent as it is true, and it goes like this: big fish swallow little fish. That’s the story behind business in American — and behind my family’s move to Virginia. Northwest Carolina Utilities, the company that lit the lamps in Blowing Rock, was swallowed by the slightly bigger firm that took us to Burnsville; then that one was ingested by East Coast Electric, which moved us to a succession of towns in eastern Virginia; only to be gobbled up in turn by VEPCO, the great white shark that eventually beached my father at its corporate headquarters in Richmond.