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

(Note: Although having in my young adult years become an ardent admirer if not a literal connoisseur of the female derriere, I can assure you that I never once, neither vocally nor in my private thoughts, referred to a woman’s anatomical assets as a bumptaratum: as much as it may have amused and puzzled my mother when I was three and four, the word is silly, cartoonish, and anything but sexy. On the other hand, if any human rump of my acquaintance deserved the bumptaratum label, it was Howie’s. Nonetheless, why the epithet would reassert itself in my consciousness after so long a time and in such a precarious situation, I cannot say. Perhaps it was my brain’s attempt at gallows humor.)

In truth, we were in no clear and present danger of death. The seven or eight students above Howie could have returned to the surface and gone for help, though it would have meant crawling backward for forty or fifty yards, there being inadequate space to turn fully around; while those of us below Howie could have, as a last resort I suppose, followed the cave to the place where it terminated on a bluff above the Maury River, but as aforementioned, that terminus was a good (make that “bad”) mile away, a twisty route fraught with mazes and cul-de-sacs. Meanwhile, claustrophobia, which had been skulking around the perimeters of our party from the outset, now commenced to pull down its plastic bags over first one head and then another. There were no signs of outright panic, but I could hear guys inhaling abnormally, as if to hoard precious oxygen; and when a flashlight ray happened to sweep over a face, the expression illuminated there was one of classic unease.

An experienced spelunker, the professor himself sounded calm enough as after surveying the state of affairs, he called for a show of pocketknives. Pocketknives? Was he kidding? These were W&L men. These men were, for the most part, sons of doctors, lawyers, and captains of industry; men who drove British sports cars between campus and their fraternity houses, men who’d studied Greek and Latin at high-toned New England boarding schools, men who named their newspaper the Ring-tum Phi . There wasn’t a pocketknife in the bunch. (My own trusty blade had been confiscated at Hargrave for reasons that are now unclear.)

So… we dug Howie free with our bare hands. Fortunately, the walls that confined the bulbous bumptaratum were mostly clay, studded here and there with limestone shale: hard, yes, but sufficiently pliable when gouged and clawed by desperate hands. It took at least a quarter hour of vigorous quarrying, several broken fingernails, and doubtlessly an incipient blister or two, but eventually we volunteer diggers clawed out just enough wiggle room for escape, and Howie dropped down into our midst like a space capsule home from the moon. We couldn’t make out his expression in the subterranean gloom but he had to have known that he was destined to become the butt of numerous butt jokes.

Ever professional, our geologist proceeded to deliver his intended talk on cave formation, although all of us suspected it was an abbreviated version. Then, dirty, tired, and anxious, the lot of us made for the surface, and I was hardly alone in making sure I stayed upward of Howie. Blue sky, when finally glimpsed, had seldom looked so sweet. We did not exit through the gift shop.

As part of the university’s physical education program, all W&L sophomores were given golf lessons. Behind the grandstand, those in my class gathered three times a week to practice the proper holding of a club, the addressing of the ball, and the swing with its all-important follow-through. In order to earn credit for the course, each of us, at the conclusion of these lessons, was obliged on his own to go actually play nine holes of golf at Lexington’s public links. However, on the final day of lessons, the instructor placed a plastic water pail approximately twenty yards from where we’d assembled, and brandishing a seven iron, announced that the student who, with said iron, landed his chip shot closest to the pail would be excused from playing the obligatory round. Okay, fair enough.

My turn. I addressed the ball. I swung. The ball was launched. The ball sailed. The ball looped. The ball came down. In the bucket. Not merely close to but… in the bucket! I kid you not. It was pure luck, of course, or divine intervention (the gods are always watching, and sometimes, usually when we least expect it, they smile on us, they grin and make it possible for us to pull something grand or goofy or both out of our bumptaratums). In any event, nodding at the future golfers, I laid down my club that fine spring afternoon and never picked one up again.

In one of my novels, I have a character say, “Golf is basketball for people who can’t jump and chess for people who can’t think.” That wasn’t very cute of me, especially since I have two good friends, a successful film director and a brilliant painter, who are fairly passionate about the game. My antipathy for golf is no doubt due to a certain prejudice against the men most often associated with amateur golfing: country-club types who use the links to make contacts, seal deals, swap information, and in general advance business careers without seeming to be conducting business; and, more recently in our social history, the kind of blue-collar round-the-clock sports nuts who consider the Super Bowl the crowning achievement of Western civilization, and for whom golf, unlike hockey, say, or football, is an opportunity to participate personally in a sport in which “real athletes” also perform. In both cases, these duffers delude themselves into believing they’re actually getting exercise, and in both cases, when push comes to shove, they’d rather be playing golf than having sex with their wives.

It’s been said that golf is a Zen activity. I’d argue that if golfers were practicing Zen, they wouldn’t keep score. Or ever get angry when they blow a shot. But what do I know? If you recall, I owe my personal enlightenment to a neon golf ball.

Obviously, I didn’t learn to play golf at Washington and Lee, but what, then, did I learn prior to dropping out at the end of my sophomore year? (Rumor has it that I was expelled from a fraternity — some say the university — for throwing biscuits at my house mother, but in fact, while there was a dining room food fight that got a trifle out of hand, I wasn’t expelled for my role therein, merely reprimanded.) Let me see: I learned that Henry Miller could write incandescent circles around the dullards we studied in lit. class (Andrew Marvell is not marvelous); I learned to read German (not simply newspapers but Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann); learned that wearing a coat and tie could be advantageous when hitchhiking; and, well, learned to drink bourbon, although in retrospect I could have learned that back in Blowing Rock from my old granny.

Sophronia Ann Robbins, known for miles around as “Aunt Phronie” or simply “Granny,” was a mountain woman right out of central casting. Tall and gaunt, her igloo white hair pulled back in a severe bun, she wore actual bonnets, high-top shoes, ankle-length gingham dresses that she made herself; kept a cow she milked every morning, churning her own butter; kept hogs she butchered in the fall, making not only sausage and liver mush from the flesh but rendering pig fat with lye in a huge cast-iron cauldron to produce the soap with which she laundered the family’s clothes, and with which, not suffering fools gladly, she would threaten to wash out the sassy mouths of her grandkids. (Once she scolded Cousin Martha and me that we weren’t fit to lick a dog’s ass, pronouncing “ass” as “ice” — and suggesting that she could use some oral soaping herself.)