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

Now, I never heard the gentleman preach: this was racially segregated Virginia, remember, and there was nary a white face in his congregation. Nevertheless, had it been the rambunctious Rev. Ever Ready rather than the cadaverish Dr. Peters offering to drive me to Christ, I’d have been considerably more eager to get aboard. To get a plank. To get my ass in the truck.

On a sweltering August night, I sat in a sticky pew, nervously awaiting the call. When it came, I walked to the front of the church (the lights were low, the congregation was softly singing), and along with a handful of other repentants surrendered my life to Yeshua bin Miriam, the radical itinerant rabbi known to English-speaking Christians as Christ Jesus. My mother was overjoyed, my father pleased enough, Dr. Peters carved another notch in his pastoral pistol, and I was… well, kind of on pins and needles.

What exactly was I expecting? I could not have said with any degree of articulation, I just thought I’d feel somehow different . Oh, I felt good about myself, felt a certain sense of accomplishment, felt marginally safer even; but when I awoke the next morning, there was no aura around the objects in my room, no radiance in my mirror, I was unmotivated to go forth and help the sick and needy (not that I’d had a clue where to begin), and instead of turning for guidance to the family Bible, I found myself reaching for the Hardy Boys mystery novel I’d started a day or two before. Maybe, I thought, nothing has changed because I haven’t yet been baptized.

I didn’t have long to wait. Within a fortnight, I was wading fully clad (I argued for old clothes but Mother insisted I don my very best) into the Rappahannock River, in which Dr. Peters stood up to his skinny thighs. When it was my turn, he told me to hold my nose, placed a hand in the small of my back, another behind my head, said a short prayer, and completely immersed me. I waded to shore, soaked, dripping, uncomfortable, but pretty confident that henceforth I would live my life in virtue and light.

Impatiently, I waited to be transported, to be transformed, to be illuminated (whatever that meant precisely). A day passed. Three days. A week. Was my soul so wicked it was beyond redemption? Had they shrunk my favorite pants for nothing? Was I damned? Then it happened: I was struck full force by spiritual lightning.

As it turned out, Dr. Peters had nothing to do with it, Rev. Ever Ready was not even remotely involved, nor had Lord Jesus himself hurled the bolt from above. No, my sudden spiritual awakening was precipitated by Miss Natalie Wood.

Leaving my twin sisters with a sitter one evening, my parents had allowed me to accompany them to a movie in Callao, a town about a dozen miles from Warsaw. The film, entitled Tomorrow Is Forever, dealt with the shock, confusion, and heartache that ensues when a soldier, thought to have been killed in battle, returns alive years later (his war-disfigured face unrecognizably altered by plastic surgery), to find that in his absence, his wife and presumed widow has married another man. Natalie Wood, then eight years old and pretty, sweet, and vulnerable, played the adopted daughter of the resurrected man, trying to be brave as her young life is squeezed through one emotional ringer after another.

Okay, it was a Hollywood tear pump, a celluloid onion chopper, yet the film was skillfully executed (Orson Welles had a hand in it), and from young Natalie there rippled echo-circles of such genuine poignancy that they melted the shadow between make-believe and the real world. I doubt that I cried in the theater — it would have caused me terminal embarrassment — but on the drive home, as I sat alone in the dark backseat, a few drops leaned their slick bald heads over the window ledge of my tear ducts, glancing around to see if the coast was clear. And then… something else happened.

My sorrow unexpectedly widened and deepened, became less focused on the Natalie Wood character, become increasingly comprehensive — enveloping not only hurt children and suffering innocents everywhere but also Hiroshima victims, Huck Finn’s Jim, our neighbor’s recently euthanized cat, and so on and so forth. Natalie’s character also embodied a stubborn, contagious hopefulness, and in me that hope commenced to expand geometrically, as well, eventually morphing into something akin to universal love.

My scruffy whippersnapper heart opened like a sardine tin, my impressionable kiddish brain sidestepped the domination of cognitive experience; I sensed the world in me and me in the world, felt fundamentally connected, saw the many as all and the all as one; one and all bobbing along forever and ever in an unending, indestructible river of tears and tickles, breath and meat. In this totally unfamiliar oceanic state, momentarily free of self-involvement, conventional knowledge, and pedestrian consciousness, radiating such a vortex of woo-woo love it would have made Saint Francis of Assisi seem like a mink rancher, I finally felt “saved.” And while it was not quite the salvation Mother and Dr. Peters had in mind, I was certain it suited God and Jesus just fine. Blessed be Natalie Wood.

School opened in Warsaw that very week, and I, entering eighth grade, was soon caught up in activities curricular and extra that left scant time to reflect on my cosmic illumination. The clear light slowly faded and I was not to experience anything similar until, decades later, I was introduced to meditation and the psychedelic sacraments. It was hardly the last time, however, that I was affected profoundly by cinema.

A film that comes immediately to mind is François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, which I watched alone at a private screening in 1963, having gone to review the movie for the Seattle Times . After leaving the theater, I did not — could not — speak for three whole days. The unexplained silence caused my baffled wife to flee, moving into a motel until I recovered my voice. Susan never understood and I’m unsure if I can explain it adequately even now, except to say that Truffaut’s daring artistry validated unexpectedly yet completely my nascent literary vision, giving me the confidence to bring it, in time, to fruition.

In one amazing scene, a young woman about whom Truffaut has led us to care deeply, is shot by gangsters who are hiding out on a French farm. It’s winter, and when the dear girl topples, her body goes sliding slowly, gracefully, on and on, down a long slope covered with snow. Our hearts are breaking over the girl’s death, yet the long snowy scene (shot in black and white) is, from an aesthetic perspective, breathtakingly beautiful. The audience is pulled in two directions at once, and it was this dichotomy and others like it in early Truffaut that led me to accept and eventually act upon my own life view, my native hardwired inclination to mix, intermingle — even fuse — in my novels the tragic with the comic, the ugly with the beautiful, the romantic with the gritty, fantasy with reality, mythos with logos, the sensible with the goofy, the sacred with the profane. Hidebound critics experience some difficulty with this approach, finding it challenging to comprehend, for example, how writing can be simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, although to the nimble-minded among us it seems every bit as appropriate as it does surprising.

In any case, while Shoot the Piano Player may have had the more obvious effect on my life, it would be wrong to dismiss that awakening precipitated by Tomorrow Is Forever and little Natalie Wood. Natalie, whose birth name, incidentally, was Nikolaevna Zakharenko, grew up to be a major Hollywood actress, starring in such memorable motion pictures as Splendor in the Grass and Rebel Without a Cause . According to gossip, she was also quite naughty in her adult life, though far be it from me to hurl any stones. In an interview, her friend and fellow actor Dennis Hopper told how Natalie had to be rushed to a hospital emergency room because during one of their wild parties she’d had champagne poured on her vagina. Bull! I’m not defending Natalie because once upon a time she brought me closer to Love and Truth and God, but Hopper was a creative artist who could sometimes be creative with facts, and I can tell you from personal experience that champagne, however directly or copiously applied, causes neither pain nor injury to a woman’s treasure, her salty peach, her rosy aperture, her nether diadem.