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

I don’t suppose there’s a category in Guinness for long-distance urination, though admittedly I’ve not looked to see. Certainly, this was my one and only encounter with the sport. We moved upriver to Kilmarnock, Virginia, late that summer, so I have no clear idea how the youth of salty Urbanna might have interacted upon attaining puberty; how, if at all, the peeing competitions affected later relationships. Maybe, as she grew older, an Urbanna girl would change a guy’s luck by shampooing him.

Despite the brevity of our stay in Urbanna, the place left a mark on me that persists to this day. Fresh from pre — Great Society, pre-network-TV Appalachia, I spoke with an accent that would have made the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies sound like the Royal Academy performing King Lear . There’s no way I can accurately reproduce on paper the way I pronounced, for example, words such as “night” or “ice” or “grass,” although I can report that I said “far” for “fire” and “hain’t” for “ain’t,” which could be a bit confusing since back in Blowing Rock we called a ghost a “haint.” Imagine someone exclaiming, “Looky thar in the winder! Hain’t that a haint?”

Naturally, the pupils at my new school made fun of the way I talked: kids are blunt in their reaction to deviations from their particular social norms. Alas, I was mocked by Urbanna’s adults, as well. Once when Mother sent me to the store to buy a pound of sliced ham for supper, the butcher stared at me incomprehensibly, then demanded I repeat my order again and again. “Slyced hame,” I kept saying, pronouncing “ham” as if it rhymed with “came” or “lame.” Eventually, my order was filled, though not before I had to point at what I wanted and everyone in the store enjoyed a laugh at my expense.

Spurred by ridicule, I soon commenced to devote much time and effort to altering my manner of speech, practicing off and on throughout the day, laboring to talk as if I were somehow indigenous to tidewater Virginia. The results were not pretty. Sure, “hain’t” was no longer in my vocabulary and I could now order flesh of the pig without embarrassment, but overall what happened was that my elocution flattened out permanently into a kind of deflated Okie drawl.

Today, my voice sounds as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear. While to my mind’s ear, I might sound like an Oxford-educated intellectual, I have only to hear myself on tape to realize that in actuality mine is the voice of a can of cheap dog food — if a can of cheap dog food could speak. It’s a Skippy voice. Not even that, a generic brand with a plain brown label. Thanks, at least in part, to the jeerers and sneerers of Urbanna, I’m going through life with a voice that might be visualized as something scraped off the kitchen floor of a fast-food restaurant by a pimply teenage dishwasher at closing time on Friday night. Or else that little pile of smashed potato chips left on the rubberized seat cushion of a motorized wheelchair belonging to a 365-pound retired female professional wrestler named Grandma Moses. Or else… well, you get the picture.

In one of my early novels, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the protagonist, Sissy Hankshaw, is born with abnormally large thumbs. Rather than submit meekly to the deformity, she elects to turn the tables on it, exploit it, have fun with it, make an art of it, ride it all the way to glory. I’m not as wise as Sissy, but I have in recent years come to accept my voice, even cheerfully embrace it — although there are delusional moments (usually while lecturing or reading aloud in public) when I’m still convinced I’m sounding a lot like Jeremy Irons.

There’s an area of tidewater Virginia known widely and semiofficially as the Northern Neck. It is, indeed, a “neck” of sorts; which is to say a peninsula: bordered on the south by the Rappahannock River, on the north by the Potomac, terminating at the Chesapeake Bay. There are four counties in the Neck, each just far enough downwind from Washington, D.C., to escape moral contamination.

Kilmarnock is the largest town in the Neck; Warsaw the most vibrant, though “vibrant” may be too fancy a word for any community in this region of farmers and fishermen. Our family alighted on Kilmarnock like flies landing on a horse biscuit, shooed away by the swishing tail of circumstance before we could savor a proper taste. Our home there, for the few months it lasted, was a plain single-story clapboard cottage, bereft of marble, of ornament, of any upper chamber where a sexy Samaritan might assist in the tonsorial hygiene of needy gentlemen.

The house was situated at the far end of town, piney woods behind and on one side of it; on the other side, a vacant field. The only neighbors were across the road and we rarely saw them, so it was months before I learned that my sixth-grade teacher lived there, the very one who slapped my face for “sassy” behavior. (I suspect that I, a devotee of atlases, had corrected her none too diplomatically in front of the class for some shocking display of geographic ignorance, à la Sarah Palin.) Moreover, our house sat back quite a distance from the road, so overall it’s fair to say we were a trifle isolated, a fact that made Mother uneasy, especially since Daddy was usually only home on weekends. No doubt it was due to Mother’s nervousness that on weeknights she, my twin sisters (then age four), and I all slept in the same smallish bedroom.

Late one night (it was past my bedtime at any rate), Mother thought she heard a noise outside. When she slipped into the darkened living room to investigate, she saw that a car was parked in our long dirt driveway. Its engine wasn’t running and its headlights were off. She watched the car for five or ten minutes. When she returned to our bedroom, she was carrying a butcher knife.

It was a mild Indian summer night (since, technically, Indian summers can only occur after there has been a frost, it was probably toward the end of October) and the bedroom window was raised. The window was, however, permanently screened. Pointing to the window, Mother handed me the knife. In a low voice she instructed me to await her signal. When and if it came, I was to slice open the screen, lower Mary and Marian outside, follow them out, lead them quickly away from the house, and hide.

Zing! Adrenaline shot through me like a crystal meth espresso through a break-dancer. I was scared, to be sure, but equally elated, fairly throbbing with anticipation. I’d been reading The Three Musketeers that same week, and the moment my hand closed around that knife handle I was transformed into d’Artagnan. “All for one and one for all!” I exclaimed, a trifle too loudly to suit Mother’s mood.

Before she tiptoed back to the living room, she put a finger to her lips, then gestured for me to rouse my sisters. “There’s a bad car in the driveway,” I said as I tugged at their bedclothes. “Who in tha car?” mumbled Marian, barely half awake. “Cardinal Richelieu and his lieutenants,” I replied, still tugging. They gazed at me without an atom of comprehension.

Herded to a place by the window, the twins, who heretofore had been too sleepy to do more than whimper a little, now commenced to actively whine. “Hush,” I cautioned. “There’s a car out there full of escaped maniacs. Do you want them to come kill us and eat our brains?” Evidently, the girls did not. They became saucer-eyed and silent, though now they were shaking like cherubs on an ice floe. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll protect you.” Cleverly, they responded in Morse code, tapped out with their teeth.

Since I was seven years older than my sisters and a boy to boot, my attitude toward them had naturally been one of indifference. Benign neglect. Now, however, having suddenly been put in charge of their physical survival, I was totally prepared to shepherd them into the forest and shelter them there; to guard those girls all night if necessary. All night? Maybe several nights. Hey, maybe a week! Who knew how long the fiends in that car — be they slobbering maniacs, a band of robbers, or, more likely, Japanese spies (the war in the Pacific was raging then) — would occupy our home? At some point, I might have to sneak into the house and cut Mother free of the ropes with which they’d surely bind her, particularly if, while stealthily foraging for food scraps in the garbage can out back, I should detect sounds of torture, a situation that might necessitate hand-to-hand combat.