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

Upon arrival at Hargrave, I was assigned the oddest, most isolated room in the academy. What was up with that? Had they heard something? Did they fear I might incite rebellion — or worse, subject innocent cadets to the spectacle of the talking stick?

Tucked away in a remote corner of the third and top floor, the room was exceptionally large: long and narrow with a slanted ceiling and single small window, giving every appearance of having once been an attic. This room was so far removed from administration offices, from dayroom, classrooms, dining hall, gym, and quadrangle that its occupants had to set a clock to alarm at least five minutes before reveille (the actual bugle call that awoke the rest of the cadet corps) in order to fall out on time for morning formation.

I had two roommates. From Virginia peanut country, there was a mild-mannered boy, bespectacled, still freighting half a load of baby fat, and bearing the almost Faulknerian name of Ollie Hux. In the other bunk, from the Dominican Republic, was a handsome, worldly, self-assured Hargrave veteran named Pelayo Brugál. There were quite a few Hispanic cadets enrolled at the academy, largely from the Caribbean and South America, places where the military in particular and machismo in general were the cat’s meow and not a caterwaul less.

Brugál (accent on the last syllable) had seniority among the Hispanics and was their natural leader. He helped them academically, taught new arrivals the ropes. As a result, our big “attic” room was a Hispanic gathering place. Afternoons, it was crowded with boys from Venezuela and Cuba, jabbering away in Spanish, the world’s fastest language, seeming to all talk at once. It was like living in a cage full of parrots whose crackers had been laced with crystal meth. I found it agreeably colorful.

For whatever reason, Brugál had not been home in two years, spending his summers at Hargrave. That year (my year), however, he flew down to join his family for the Christmas holidays. With him, he carried two suitcases, one packed with clothing, the other empty.

It so happened that Pelayo’s father and uncle owned the largest rum distillery in the Dominican Republic. When Brugál returned to school during the first week of January, the previously empty suitcase was now filled. With bottles of rum. Fine Dominican rum. Rum, the higher life-form that crawled out of the primal ooze of molasses.

Every night after taps, when the academy was quiet and dark, Pelayo would steal to our closet and remove a bottle from the locked bag. He, Ollie Hux, and I would each swallow a nice big slug. It was warming. It was uplifting. It was fraternal. It made for sound sleep and pleasant dreams. Happy, well rested, and maybe a trifle smug, we were willfully oblivious to the certainty that we were flirting with fire. Then, on February 19, the school burned down.

When the fire alarm sounded that night during study hour, I, along with other cadets from that end of the third floor, scampered down the nearest fire escape. Even though we caught a faint whiff of smoke, none of us expected the fire, which started in a teacher’s quarters on the floor below, to amount to very much. Believing that we’d rather quickly be back in our rooms, we cheerfully welcomed this unscheduled break from the books. Then we looked up and saw flames. And they appeared to be spreading.

Rescuing the rum was out of the question, but my Warsaw basketball letter jacket was in our room, along with photos of (mostly imaginary) girlfriends, a sweater, and some warm socks: it was fifteen degrees that night and I’d fled in khaki pants, a T-shirt, and bedroom slippers. So, sensing now that the situation might actually turn into something serious, I headed back up the fire escape, and intent on grabbing those items that passed pitifully for my valuables, climbed again through the open window.

On the ground, what had initially been a semifestive atmosphere was digressing into shock and pandemonium. Cadets, faculty, and staff milled about in helpless confusion, awaiting the arrival of Chatham’s one fire engine. Nobody saw me return to the burning building, there were no shouts of warning, no hysterical mother wailed, “Fireman, Fireman, save my child!”

Once inside the third-floor hallway, I crashed headlong into a wall of heated smoke. I’d taken only a couple of steps before smoke filled my eyes, my nose, my throat. It felt as if a troop of Girl Scouts were toasting marshmallows in my lungs. (Sure, it could just as well have been Boy Scouts, but even near death I preferred the company of females.) On the verge of losing consciousness, I managed to execute a clumsy about-face and practically somersaulted back through the window. If anyone noticed my descent, coughing and choking, they gave no indication. In minutes, I was just another figure in the crowd, watching with a mixture of fascination, excitement, disbelief, and dismay, the metastasizing flames. Nobody thought to have me treated for smoke inhalation.

Yeah, impulsive Tommy Rotten had been lucky to get out alive, but I was fortunate in another way as well. Inevitably, sooner or later, that secret stash of rum would have been discovered — it was stupid to think otherwise — and Pelayo Brugál, Ollie Hux, and I would have been given the ol’ spit-shined boot, our names to be chiseled below that of Stu Seaworth in the Hargrave hall of shame. And who can say what trajectory my life might have taken thereafter? No longer admissible to the college of my choice, and at seventeen too young to seek refuge in the army, I… well, I like to think I might have followed Brugál down to Santo Domingo, where I would have written a version of The Rum Diary years before Hunter S. Thompson. It’s debatable whether or not that could be considered a happy ending.

Hargrave rose from the ashes. Like the Phoenix? No, more like the Tucson — at least for the remainder of that school year. Following a month’s suspension, the academy amazingly reopened in March, but with major adjustments. Surrounded by parade grounds, an athletic field, a quadrangle, and an outdoor swimming pool, Hargrave had occupied a single extremely long three-story building, only one end of which had survived the fire. That end contained the gymnasium, now converted to a dining hall, and living quarters for approximately one-third of the cadets. The rest of us were distributed around Chatham in various temporary locations, I being lucky enough to be included in a group of about twenty that was housed in a downtown hotel.

Because our uniforms had gone up in smoke, we now wore civilian clothes. This spelled a blessed end to daily inspections and gave us a newfound sense of freedom, but failed to adequately conceal our identities as cadets. At the insistence of their parents, if not wholly a matter of personal preference, town girls continued by and large to shun us, and Chatham Hall girls remained as distant as ever, although from our hotel rooms we could spy on them during their weekly visits to the business district to pick up girlie items at the drugstore, etc. They came on foot, always in parties of ten or more, and were as heavily chaperoned as a shipment of weapons-grade plutonium.

We still were subject to curfews and to morning formations (now a rather motley agglomeration), but drilling was suspended for the duration, which oddly enough displeased me. I rather liked to drill and was fairly good at it, having been trained in the Boy Scouts. You see, the adult males who organized and presided over my Scout patrol in Warsaw had seemed less interested in making outdoorsmen of us boys than in teaching us to drill, box, and to properly care for the American flag. I can see now that they were out to mold us into little fascists, and recalling their incessant racist and anti-Semitic remarks, I have a suspicion that at least a couple were members of the Ku Klux Klan. There was more Klan activity in 1940s Virginia than people today realize. In any case, my entire Scout patrol was suspended after some of us were caught drinking cheap wine (ninety-five cents a bottle cheap, paid for with our Scouting dues), and peeking in the windows of comely housewives (in lieu, perhaps, of earning a merit badge for bird-watching).