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

While I won’t claim that tomatoes have brought me closer to Love and Truth and God, they have enriched my life on countless occasions, especially when sliced, salted, and laid between two slices of soft white bread slathered edge to edge with mayonnaise.

My passion for the tomato sandwich, which persists to this day, blossomed in Warsaw, hardly a coincidence since prior to our settling in Virginia I could be counted among the millions of Americans who’ve never tasted a proper tomato. In the Puget Sound area, where I now reside, summers aren’t hot enough, soil lacks the proper acid content and holds too much water. As a consequence, the tomatoes grown here taste only marginally better than soggy Kleenex. Many other parts of the U.S. also roll out tomatoes consistently deficient in both flavor and nutrition. In Virginia’s Richmond and Hanover counties, heat, sandy soil, and high pH factors combine to produce love apples that lend credence to Erica Jong’s otherwise cryptic line, “If a woman wants to be a poet, she must dwell in the house of the tomato.”

I cannot speak for female poets, their abodes or their education, but during my summer of avoiding Dr. Peters and embracing Natalie Wood, the two summers I worked in the fields, and many summers thereafter, I did dwell in the house of the tomato sandwich, though it was less a house, I suppose, than a boat: a modest yet spunky little raft in a sea of culinary confusion, defiantly flying a flag foreign to canapé-snapping gourmets and junk-food junkies alike. Long may it wave. On the other hand, maybe my favorite sandwich — indeed, my all-around, all-time favorite food — has been less a barge than a temple, say; a shrine, a zendo, a pantheon. If a boy wants to be a writer, must he worship in the church of the tomato?

I would be derelict did I not point out that these days, even in perfectly suited eastern Virginia, it’s nearly impossible to find a worthy, healthy, full-flavored, densely pulped, intoxicatingly pungent tomato for sale in any public market. The reason is that our shoddy, fast-buck, rush-to-profit economy encourages growers to pick and ship fruits much too soon. Many people hold to the belief that a tomato, especially if left to rest in a sunny place, will continue to ripen once picked, an assumption that is patently false. A picked tomato may continue to “redden,” true enough, but as any plant biologist will tell you, reddening is not the same thing as ripening. Outwardly, a prematurely harvested tomato may be blushing like Natalie Wood in the emergency room (Dennis Hopper’s little fantasy), but inwardly its sugaring process — so essential for flavor — has come to a screeching halt.

Without apparent guilt or shame, supermarkets from coast to coast regularly post signs reading VINE RIPENED TOMATOES atop produce bins piled high with tomatoes that have never ever experienced the joys of ripening; that, in fact, are hard, usually more pink than red, often streaked with yellow, orange, or even green; and when cut open will reveal pectin deposits of ghostly white. Back when one of those babies last saw a vine, it might have passed for the viridescent apple of Granny Smith’s eye. Merchants who through ignorance, indifference, or outright chicanery untruthfully promise “vine-ripened tomatoes” could and should be prosecuted under truth-in-advertising laws.

Erica Jong is a lusty woman. I can no more believe that she would advise poets to take up residence in some weak, pink, corporate tomato than I, when I opened Jitterbug Perfume with the line “The beet is the most intense of vegetables,” intended for readers to think of any but the reddest of beets. Being a root vegetable, beets aren’t subject to issues of ripening, of course, but still, a yellow beet?! Fie on that craven, that fool’s gold, that ditzy blonde, that impostor, that stand-in (but never stunt double: if you doubt that red beets do their own stunts, check your toilet bowl the morning after). For intensity, one wants a red beet. For delectability, one wants a tomato, authentically ripe. Apparently, both can be inspirational.

By the time I was ten months old, I was both walking and talking. Scarcely taller than a bowling pin, as fair of hair as one of those Aryan tots with whom Hitler and his henchmen loved to pose, clad only in diapers or rompers, I must have cut quite a figure toddling down Blowing Rock’s main street beside my mother. Looks, however, weren’t the whole of it. Shopkeepers, amused loafers, and other citizens would often fork over pieces of penny candy or even an occasional Popsicle to hear this ambulatory baby speak in complete, if short, sentences. Apparently, it never occurred to anyone that Mother might have been a ventriloquist.

If I was performing like a trained seal, it didn’t bother Mother (blinded, perhaps, by her pride in my precocity), and if it twisted my psyche in some lasting way, I’ve managed to mostly compensate. What it did do was to instill in me at a very early age the knowledge that words have worth, have power; that language can command rewards. And Freud might argue that that was enough to set my course as a writer.

Not so fast, Uncle Sigmund. While the favorable response to my surprisingly articulate jabber could very well have planted the seed from which whole narratives would in a few short years be sprouting — verbal displays that may indeed have leaned toward attention and approval the way a potted geranium leans toward the sun — there are also completely private acts of literary creation that seek no audience, deny appreciation, are meant never to be read or heard; and these are not so handily explained. Consider, for example, my “talking stick.”

Although this activity began sporadically a year or two earlier, and continued in an abbreviated, more surreptitious fashion for a year or two thereafter, its golden age was my time in Warsaw, roughly between the ages of eleven and sixteen. It involved me making up stories and telling them to myself while I beat the ground with a long stick.

I’d pace, sometimes back and forth, sometimes in circles, speaking all the while in a low voice, or more usually only mouthing the words, but “writing” scenes in my head and tapping them into being. There was nothing especially outlandish about the stories themselves: tales set in jungles and circuses, foreign spy adventures, sports stories (I created a baseball hero named Tex Halo, a quarterback called Skyrocket McNocket), the kind of fantasizing or daydreaming one might expect from a small-town boy. The oddity was in the execution and its persistence — although it did occur somewhat less frequently after I began dating and playing basketball.

What must poor Mother and Daddy have thought?! Due to the location of our house, it was fairly easy to conceal my stick sessions from neighbors and the street, but from the kitchen window or the back porch my parents had a clear view of their only son talking to himself for hours on end while attacking the earth with a rough length of sapling. Moreover, there were large patches of bare ground here and there where enthusiastic literary composition had annihilated the grass. I was hell on lawns.

I’ve no idea with what concern, consternation, or wringing of hands they might have discussed my behavior when alone, but to their credit (or was it?) my folks never once ridiculed me, tried to dissuade me, or (to the best of my knowledge) consulted a child psychologist. Neither, however, did they blindly ignore the activity or try to pretend it didn’t exist. Rather, they spoke openly about it, casually referring to it from time to time, calling it “Tommy’s talking stick” — their term, not mine — as if it were a quirk they found interesting, perhaps peculiar, but not disturbing.