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

Feeling like humanity’s lonely orphan, unsure what to do next, I turn the corner and walk down deserted Rainey Street. Then I see her! Granny Robbins, in her long granny dress and Frankenstein shoes, is standing in the expansive front yard next to her prize hydrangea bush, matter-of-factly raking leaves. So what if it’s Judgment Day? She’s got chores to do. As I walk up and greet her, the dream abruptly ends.

Now, I’ve never attempted to analyze that dream, never consulted a Jungian psychologist or one of the popular dream manuals. I’m unconvinced, in fact, that dreams have a lot of meaning. When we fall asleep, our mind is relieved of duty, it goes on recess, takes a play period, starts looking around for recreation. In that playful mode it snatches up images, figures, and locales from our memory vault and rearranges them, often randomly, usually out of context, for its own amusement or stimulation, trying different incongruous combinations just to observe the results. Your memory bank is your sleeping mind’s toy box. Sometimes these art projects, these little private movies and impromptu skits, require themes to legitimize them, so the mind will seize on our current worries or deep-seated fears for subject matter, and because our mind isn’t completely confined to our brain but extends, abridged, throughout our organism, biological urges (say we’re hungry, horny, or have to pee) will sometimes intrude upon the dream show, adding a touch of stark reality to what is essentially a surreal production.

Okay, but having said all that, I’m left with the still-lucid recollection of that particular dream, puzzled why it, among tens of thousands of other dreams, would have made such a lasting impression that sometimes even now “during the solemnity of midnight when every bosom is at rest except that of love and sorrow” (as they characterized insomnia in more poetic times), I’ll picture Granny and me alone on Judgment Day and wonder if there is some wider meaning there, some cryptic message from a hidden dimension, from the Other, from the Over Self. Or if it was simply that heaven didn’t want us and hell was afraid we’d take over.

The evening of my twenty-first birthday found me not in a festive bar enjoying the first legal cocktail of my shiny new adulthood, but perched instead in saggy underwear atop an olive-green footlocker shining ill-fitting new black shoes to a gloss lustrous enough to satisfy the perverse demands of a uniformed sadist who’d be in my face berating me ere the cock crowed thrice on the morrow. No, a bar it surely was not, yet there was live musical entertainment of a sort, and in a peculiar sense it affected my life in ways beyond the reach of any lounge singer in any gin joint this side of Casablanca.

Two weeks earlier, I had enlisted in the United States Air Force. Why? — one might fairly ask. Well, for precisely the same reason that 90 percent of all enlistees join the military, which is to say, I was at a point in my life when I didn’t know what else to do.

Professional patriots, religious demigods, and politicians of all stripes are wont to shine the shoes of their public image by periodic references to “the heroic men and women who sacrifice so much in order to keep America safe and preserve our freedom.” There may have been a few times in our nation’s history when such tribute was accurate and deserved (in the days and weeks following the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, for example), but I have to say that during four years in the air force, including posting at an army base in Korea; and during numerous conversations with both veterans and those on active duty, I never once heard a serviceman or — woman claim that he or she had joined up in order to preserve American values and keep their countrymen free. By and large, young people have enlisted in order to escape boredom, financial difficulties, bad relationships, and general stagnation.

The travel and adventure promised (and, yes, often delivered) by the military is not a component of basic training. From the hour one lands in boot camp all thoughts of future fun and past attachments are pounded out of one’s consciousness; one is locked in a perpetual present designed to purge one of any trace of individuality and extract from one any erg of energy with which one might presume to resist. Talk about a makeover! It can leave the new recruit feeling exhausted, beaten down, lost, apprehensive, and that he’s probably made a terrible mistake. That, as a matter of fact, fairly accurately describes the state most of my platoon mates and I would be in when, slumped on our footlockers at Sampson Air Force Base, New York, buffing our ugly brogans and dreading the too-soon-upon-us dawn, we’d be treated to the aforementioned “musical entertainment.”

Almost to a man, the two dozen or so recruits in our platoon had lived their entire lives in the racially segregated South, only to find themselves now in a freshly integrated military, spending days and nights in close company and on equal footing with members of a familiar yet alien race. There were only three or four blacks in our unit and the attitude of the white guys seemed one of passive curiosity rather than hostility or resentment, although frankly we were all too tired and distracted to give racial differences much thought. There was at least one prominent difference, however, and it asserted itself in a manner whose benefits the Pentagon could not have foreseen.

We honkies would be sitting there by our bunks, shining and whining, enveloped in a forlorn funk, when down the center aisle would come one of the black guys on his way to the latrine, the water fountain, or the bulletin board; and he’d be all grinning and relaxed, just snapping his fingers, shaking his booty, and, singing; not showing off, mind you, or seeking attention, just unself-consciously lost in the music he was hearing in his head and his heart, a music that toil and trouble could not silence — and perhaps made necessary. It never failed to lift our spirits or send us to bed in a rosier mood. I report this not to perpetuate the myth of racial specializations — the musicality of African Americans doubtlessly owes far more to environment than to genetics — but it’s impossible to recall those moments in my barracks without thinking of the Revue Nègre, Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker et al, and how expatriate black American jazzmen put a smile back on the sad face of a Europe chronically depressed in the years after World War I.

Two centuries earlier, America itself began to be slowly uplifted by a people they had enslaved. Our nation was settled, remember, by emotionally constipated Puritans and purse-lipped prudes; expanded by brutish fortune hunters with a taste for hardtack and genocide. It would be insensitive to say in regard to something as evil as slavery that it’s an ill wind that blows no good, but it’s a fact that in addition to their other contributions, former African slaves managed over time to bring joy to a dour, priggish population which danced, when it deigned to dance at all, with heavy feet and a guilty conscience.

In any event, that experience in air force boot camp stayed with me, doubtlessly affecting in some way my unpopular stance as an integrationist in 1950s Richmond.

By the way, I alone among the white recruits actually recognized those songs that the black recruits were singing. There was a catchy one whose refrain went, “Ain’t that crazy, crazy, crazy?” A question apropos to so many situations in life. And there was “Work with Me, Annie,” whose lyrics had almost as many lives as a cat. Etta James recorded a supposedly cleaned-up version called “Roll With Me, Henry,” but even that proved too risqué for white radio. Eventually, Georgia Gibbs scored one of the very first hits in the new genre of rock and roll with a further sanitized version entitled “Dance with Me, Henry.” Needless to say, the original song’s sequel, “Annie Had a Baby,” was too earthy — and too scary — to be even considered for Caucasian transliteration.