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

It was not long after the great cabbage heist that the men who worked in my grandfather’s nearby cabinet shop (on Sundays Papa rode a mule into the “hollers” to preach the Gospel to tiny congregations of hill folk; during the week he fashioned exquisite pieces of handmade furniture) began complaining that food items were missing from the lunch pails that they customarily left on a bench outside the shop.

The mystery continued for a week or more before one morning the thief was discovered in a clump of wild rhododendron bushes, chowing down on a bologna sandwich he obviously had not made himself. It’s said that “stolen honey is sweetest.” I can attest that larceny improves the taste of bologna, as well.

Gastronomic adventures persisted, I suppose, although I was nearly five when one next precipitated public scandal.

It was a summer day, so warm and slow that neither my favorite toys nor the sartorial splendor of my brand-new sun suit (that’s what the one-piece, short-legged, sleeveless outfits were called) could enliven the torpor. Eventually, the faint jingling anthem of a distant ice cream cart drifted into my notice, provoking me to slip from our yard and hurry the block and a half to the relatively bustling commercial street (it was high season in a resort town) where I quickly located the source of the entrancing tinkle.

A Popsicle cost a mere five cents, but I possessed not a single coin of the realm. Undeterred, I approached a group of tourists loitering nearby and offered to sell my sun suit. They must have thought it a cute idea because one of them tossed me a nickel.

Instantly, without ceremony, I shed my outfit, handed it over, placed an order with the incredulous pushcart vendor, and strolled home stark buck naked, licking an orange Popsicle with particular satisfaction.

Surely there were familial repercussions — new sun suits didn’t exactly grow on trees — but any memory of discipline has been successfully suppressed.

My lifelong taste for the company of the opposite sex may first have been demonstrated at age two, when I was spotted in the middle of the main highway leading out of town, hand in hand with my cousin Martha, age one and wearing only a diaper. We were blowing that provincial pop stand, baby! We were on the road! And never mind that Martha could barely put one chubby little foot in front of the other.

Our escape thwarted by meddlesome busybodies, we were driven home in a police car, much to the astonishment of our respective moms.

Cousin Martha grew up to be crowned, in her early twenties, Miss America School Teacher, the most beautiful secondary educator in the land. Me, well, it was hardly the last time I was to leave a town with a pretty young thing in tow, often with only marginally better results.

Throughout most, maybe all, of my childhood, my mother’s pet name for me was Tommy Rotten. I use the term “pet name” advisedly, for though it had been born in perplexity and consternation, it was invariably spoken with affection — and sometimes actually with a kind of ill-concealed admiration.

Lest anyone be tempted to characterize Tommy Rotten as a prototype of Bart Simpson, let it be known that for all my reckless (and usually hedonistic) mischief, I was as much a Lisa Simpson as a Bart. That is to say, I was cursed with that gene that causes children thusly afflicted to exhibit overt signs of sensitivity, to go around creating stuff (drawing pictures, putting on puppet shows, banging on the piano); and, in extreme cases, to behave as if the thermostats on their imaginations were set permanently on high.

It was almost as if some mad literary fairy, hatched perhaps in a poppy in Oscar Wilde’s garden, had tapped me with her wand as I lay in my cradle, because I fell totally in love with books as soon as I knew what books were, and I hadn’t been talking in complete sentences for many months before I announced to my parents that I intended to be a writer.

Too impatient to wait until I could spell words and scrawl them on paper, I turned my mother into my private secretary. When the muse bit me, as she did rather frequently, being indifferent to child labor laws, I’d call on Mother to stop whatever she was doing and take dictation. The fact that she was so willing to comply may be attributed to the fact that Mother herself was a frustrated writer. At eighteen, she’d been offered a scholarship to Columbia University but had been too frightened to move to New York.

It was doubtlessly her sublimated literary ambition that prompted Mother to occasionally change the wording of my dictation, to improve (in her opinion) my prose style. However, I always remembered each and every sentence I’d spoken, and would throw a tantrum until she restored my wording verbatim. When in 1975 I recounted this to Ted Solotaroff, my editor on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, he exclaimed, “My God, Robbins, you haven’t changed in forty years!”

In any case, when for my fifth birthday I was given a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs scrapbook, I began filling it not with pasted pictures but my dictated — and unedited! — stories. The very first of those stories (the scrapbook still exists) was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a tiny desert island, a barren place whose sole inhabitant was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had survived by learning to gastronomically process sand. In time, it taught the pilot to eat sand, as well, and they lived there together, man and bovine, in friendship and good health.

What meaning can we take from this first attempt at literature? That fortune favors those who improvise? That we humans have much to learn from animals? That we should insist on joy in spite of everything? The fact that the pilot didn’t rather quickly butcher the cow and commence cooking it up (thereby ensuring his starvation when the meat ran out), was that an object lesson in sustainability; a prophetic fable intended to encourage future generations to seek alternatives to the greedy, thoughtless consumption that one day would threaten to suicide the planet? You’d have had to ask little Tommy Rotten — and he wasn’t talking.

Noticing that I squinted whenever I scanned the funny papers, my parents fetched me to an optometrist. As a consequence, and much to my embarrassment, I entered first grade wearing a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. The school year was only a month or so old when Charley, the class roughneck, punched me in the face, shattering my glasses.

Can’t imagine what I might have said to provoke the little bastard. At any rate, I was physically unharmed, but the force of the blow sent a shard of glass flying (oh, delicious irony!) into his, Charley’s, right eye, and it had to be surgically removed.

Take heed, ye foul-spirited critics. Scurrilous attacks have been known to backfire.

As mentioned, I started writing fiction at age five. Hardly an overnight success, however, I didn’t get published until I was seven.

I attended a large consolidated school, grades one through twelve in the same three-story building. There was a biweekly school newspaper, edited and almost exclusively written by juniors and seniors. Well, I had recently composed on notebook paper (the Snow White scrapbook having long since been filled) a rather melodramatic story featuring a reckless boy, a courageous dog, and a dangerous waterfall; so one day during recess I trudged up to the third-floor newspaper office, slapped the story down on the surprised editor’s desk, and said, “Print this .”

It appeared in the next issue. And I thought, Hmm. That was easy. Maybe I could do this for a living.