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

Imagine my surprise when, some fifty years later, as I was inattentively listening to a program on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (my focus was on dinner), I overheard the words “talking stick.” Startled, I cranked up the sound on the radio. Among certain native tribes in Canada, I soon learned, the tribal storyteller traditionally carried a rod called a “talking stick” with which he beat out cadence as he recited his yarns.

Aha! That was it! What I had been doing as a boy was drumming, creating a rhythm for my interior monologues. That could explain why, in my adult writing, in my novels and essays, I’ve always paid special attention to the rhythm of my sentences, realizing instinctively that people read with their ears as well as their eyes. And now I could at last speak openly, even with a modicum of shy pride, about my eccentric past.

What remains unexplained is why I was moved to intentionally, consistently, secretly (God help me if my peers had found me out!) create those insubstantial narratives in the first place. Putting pencil to paper can be tedious, especially for a youngster, so I may have just hit upon a more active, energetic way to escape boredom while satisfying the commands of an excessive imagination. No matter how drab everyday existence, the talking stick allowed me to actively participate in another, more exciting, reality. In a sense, the talking stick was a joy stick; I had invented my own video game, played according to my own rules, decades before the interactive pixel was as much as a twinkle in some nerd’s eye.

In the late 1960s, my girlfriend and I watched a Fellini movie in which the phrase “a life of enchantment” appeared in the English subtitles. Afterward, over beers, Eileen announced that her intention henceforth was to live just such a life, whatever that meant exactly: in the whimsical sixties, goals of that sort were generally taken in stride. In any case, it occurs to me now that “a life of enchantment” was pretty much the very life I, stick in hand, had begun to make for myself as a boy.

Incidentally, you may be relieved to know, when I went away to college I left sticks behind. That era of my life was over. Well, almost. Certainly not a single blade of grass on the campus of Washington and Lee University ever lost its life in the service of my creative imagination. However, there were more than a few times when writing a term paper or an article for the W&L newspaper that I would become so excited in the throes of composition that I’d pace my dorm room while beating on the mattress with a coat hanger. Fortunately, I roomed alone.

For obvious reasons, no talking stick had accompanied me to Hargrave Military Academy either, which is lucky for the stick considering the fate of the items I did bring along. Before describing that fate, in all of its drama, I should probably explain what I was doing at a military prep school in the first place.

The reason is quite simple: like many if not most of the other cadets at Hargrave, I was sent there because I hadn’t distinguished myself in public high school or, rather, had distinguished myself for activities that parents and college admissions offices tend to deem less than desirable.

Commercially, administratively, Warsaw served an assortment of farmers and fishermen, every one of whom resided in the countryside or along the river some miles from town. Warsaw High School served their children, the majority of whom were bused in and out, although it also provided an approximation of education for an assortment of townies, of whom I was one. There were thirty-five seniors (all white, of course) in my graduating class, to give you an idea of the school’s size; and of that number, I alone was to earn a college degree, to give you an idea of its academic thunder, although a more revealing fact, perhaps, is that most of Warsaw’s teachers hadn’t earned degrees either. We were mostly taught by women with but two years of college; women, in some cases, barely older than their pupils — a proximity not particularly helpful when it came to maintaining order in the classroom.

Serious discipline was left to the principal (a cutup such as I wore a virtual path to his office), while punishment doled out by teachers was usually limited to assigning extra homework or making a guilty pupil stay after school. The latter justice could only be dispensed to townies, however, because the other pupils, the majority, had buses to catch, and it was not especially feared by us town boys due to the fact that the teacher with whom we would be privately sequestered was likely to be nubile and cute. Teenage boys notice such things.

Having one’s face slapped by a teacher was quite rare, but it happened to me in Warsaw as it had, the reader may recall, in Kilmarnock. What offense, what outburst of sass, I committed to inspire this particular corporal retribution I cannot remember, though I’ll never forget the aftermath.

Miss Snowden, the history teacher, was probably twenty-four or twenty-five, making her somewhat senior to her associates, though scarcely less attractive: a tall, willowy blonde, whose nickname, we kids somehow discovered and never forgot, was “Choogie.” At any rate, I’d just entertained the class with an egregiously inappropriate bon mot at a disruptively inappropriate moment when Miss Snowden choogied over to my desk and… swack! — let me have it, slapping me with such force that the ringing in my ears might have called whole populations of the faithful to prayer. She also ordered me to remain after school, a rather severe penalty on this fine spring afternoon when our baseball team (never my sport, baseball) was about to play for a conference championship.

The actual bell rang, students scurried out, some to the bus lot, others to the ball field at the far end of campus. Miss Snowden approached the desk where I sat both cautiously defiant and genuinely contrite: I liked Choogie and lacked the sophistication to try to justify my behavior on the grounds that the comedy that really matters in this world is always inappropriate. For a while she just stood there, looming over me in silence. I’d no idea what she was thinking, but I was thinking that if she slapped me again I was going to tell her about Reggie Sulley.

Reggie Sulley was a punk, a crude, cruel, smirky, dishonest creep (and here in the interest of full disclosure I should report that he and I played the same position on the basketball team, competing with mutual hostility for playing time). It so happened that Sulley and I were also among a small number of students in an unsupervised study period that convened each morning in what was Miss Snowden’s homeroom. Like a few teachers and many pupils, Miss Snowden customarily brought her lunch to school in a brown bag. She left the bag on her desk. Well, one day Sulley, in front of the dozen or so study-hall attendees, opened the bag, unwrapped a sandwich, unzipped his fly, and rubbed his penis all over the bread before returning the sandwich to the bag. So stunned were we, boys as well as girls, by the act’s audacity, not to mention its perversity, that we never reported it and discussed it only in whispers. Word spread, however, and during lunch period that day Miss Snowden’s homeroom was unusually crowded, every eye squeamishly fixed on the teacher as she innocently munched her desecrated tuna-on-rye.

Thankfully, Choogie Snowden did not tempt me to spill those sick beans. Instead of a second slap, she, after staring me down for a while, smiled, shook her blond head, and said something to the effect of “Tommy, you are a piece of work.” Then she moved to the door, gesturing for me to follow. That door, near the very front of the school, opened on a long, dimly lit, now-empty hallway that ran the length of the building. Without a word, Miss Snowden inexplicably took my hand. Took my hand! In hers! And hand in hand, like lovers strolling the Boulevard Saint-Germain, we slowly walked the whole length of that hall, at the end of which she pulled away, shooing me outside into sunlight and the noise of the distant ball game.