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

Our first stop in Virginia was Urbanna, a fishing village situated where the Rappahannock River, a mile wide near its mouth, empties into Chesapeake Bay. Crabs could be netted inside the town limits, seagulls paraded down Main Street, and the place proved salty in more ways than one. It may be no accident that Urbanna is in the country of Middlesex, accent on the last syllable.

In Urbanna we lived in a grand old house, a colonial brick manor with white columns, solid marble steps, ornate fireplaces, and enough rooms to accommodate Jesus and all twelve apostles, although Judas would have had to sleep on the sun porch. We rented the ground floor and two-thirds of the second. The owner, widow of a sea captain, shared an upstairs apartment with her grown daughter, a young divorcée apparently not thought unattractive by gentlemen callers. Mother was outraged at having come upon the saucy brunette washing the hair of one of her beaux. In retrospect, I’m guessing it was an activity, real or imagined, other than hair washing that upset my Baptist mom (after all, “cleanliness is next to godliness”). But for years thereafter “shampoo” was associated in my callow consciousness with some sort of wicked pleasure.

As befitting, perhaps, a boy not quite eleven, I personally had only one intimate encounter with the shameless shampooer (destined forever, at least in my mother’s mind, to wear a scarlet S on her bodice). She beckoned me into her bedroom one day, saying, a bit cryptically, that she had something interesting to show me. Any ill-formed hopes I might have harbored were abruptly dashed when she lifted not her skirts but the lid of a cardboard box that had arrived, she said, in the morning mail.

She lit a cigarette (doubtlessly another reason why Mother thought her a hussy) and studied my face as I stared, bewildered, at the contents of the package: a big blob of gooey goop. Predominately brown and creamy white, the mess was dotted with nodules of primary color, looking overall as if it could have been the droppings of a mythological bird, some gigantic fruit-eating cross between a pterodactyl and a peacock.

If my thoughts ran toward the ornithological they weren’t so far off, because eventually she confided, “It’s an egg.”

“Huh?”

“An Easter egg.”

“It is?”

“It was .” The dissolute shampooer laughed. Then she explained. For Easter, which was now a month or more in our rearview mirror, a sailor boyfriend stationed in Brooklyn had sent her an especially large candy egg: chocolate on the outside, vanilla cream and candied fruit in its interior. The suitor had neglected to include the state name legibly in the address (this was well before the advent of zip codes) and some myopic postal clerk had directed the package not to Urbanna but to Havana. As in Cuba.

In its weeks of travel — New York to Havana to Urbanna — the egg (it was nearly the size of a football) must have encountered sufficient hot weather to rather thoroughly melt it. And with it, I surmised, the sailor’s hopes.

If Tommy Rotten longed to stick in his finger and lick it (careful: sublimation is in the mind of the beholder), he refrained; and having now shared her story of a good egg gone bad, this small-town femme fatale indicated that show-and-tell was over. I shambled from her chamber, but in the decades since, I’ve rarely seen a chocolate egg without entertaining, however briefly, thoughts of life’s vagaries, its impermanence. And whenever I’ve mailed a package to a desirable woman, I’ve been especially careful to address it correctly.

Urbanna’s saltiness was by no means limited to our landlady’s sultry daughter. It, oddly enough, flavored even the elementary school, in whose grade five I was enrolled upon our arrival from North Carolina in April. I entered the class just as its teacher was leaving. She had joined the WACs, which in and of itself wasn’t strange: America was at war and it was a patriotic thing for an unmarried woman to do. (Evidently, the shampooer was no patriot.) But why would a popular, conscientious teacher choose to bail out on her class with only two months remaining in the school year? Couldn’t her enlistment have been delayed until June?

School administrators never said as much, but I had to wonder if the teacher wasn’t fired. Why? When I write that she was popular, I’m guilty of understatement. She was, by her pupils, adored, and much of their adoration was due to the freewheeling freedom of expression she not only allowed but encouraged. No subject was taboo in her class, and while pupils lacked the knowledge or experience to discuss anything too explicitly sexual, both their conversation and their papers (the teacher was big on written assignments) were peppered with kiddie innuendo.

For children, a slim though messy line separates the sexual from the scatological, and the themes these Urbanna fifth graders composed were ablaze not only with “hells” and “damns,” but “poops” and “pees” and “farts” and “snots,” alongside frequent references to “tongue kissing.” Once I recovered from the shock, I jumped in with merry abandon, filling my first paper with every penciled profligacy I could imagine while staying true, of course, to the subject at hand (Tommy Rotten had his literary standards).

Alas, the changing of the guard was then under way, and my paper, assigned by the libertine teacher, was graded by her conservative successor. It came back to me so marked with red ink it appeared to be hemorrhaging. It was difficult to look at it and not think of the carnage in Europe. The red F it sported was so large and bright it could have been seen by enemy aircraft, even at night. I protested this threat to national security — and for my trouble, ended up in the principal’s office, where I was so shamed I actually cried.

For the fifth grade, the era of official permissiveness was definitely over, although outside of the classroom, “salty” remained the spice du jour. Behind the school building there was an expansive grassy field, extending a great many yards beyond the portion designated as an actual playground. The field ended in swampy woods, and just inside the tree line, invisible from the school proper, was a narrow ravine. Each afternoon at recess, weather allowing, a group of a dozen or more fifth- and sixth-grade boys would disappear into those woods, and not, as one might assume, to smoke cigarettes.

I don’t remember if native curiosity prompted me to follow the group one day or if, on the reputation of my notorious heavily censored paper, I was invited along, but I became a willing witness to, though never a participant in, a ritualistic and perhaps atavistic contest. The rules were not complicated: the boys would line up along the brink, open their flies and compete to see who could direct their pee the greatest distance across the gully. Whether lunch money was wagered or it was all for glory I cannot recall, but competition was spirited.

Boys are hopelessly coarse, even disgusting creatures (all too few change with maturity), so recreation such as this shouldn’t really surprise anyone. What is a bit surprising is that it was a spectator sport — and the spectators were of that opposite, generally finer-grained sex. It’s true: at every recess a small gaggle of girls, no more than four or five, would slip into the woods to watch the proceedings. Invariably, one or more of the boys would beg a girl to give him “luck.” The bestowing of luck consisted of the girl touching the boy’s penis, a gesture that produced, along with multiple giggles, a junior erection, which could, it seemed, add an appreciable velocity to the lucky boy’s urinary propulsion, producing a trajectory that sometimes reached the opposite bank.

Thus are champions — and legends — made. Could it have been, I wonder, a similar exhibition that gave McDonald’s the idea for its golden arches?