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

How did blue-eyed Tommy Rotten happen to know those songs? Why, I’d heard them back in Warsaw at that little black-friendly Texaco station where the radio on the counter was always tuned to minority broadcasts from D.C. and Baltimore. Kid pops into a gas station to play the pinball machine and is subliminally radicalized. Ain’t that crazy, crazy, crazy?

By 1953, the Korean War had wound down, but conscription remained in effect and I was about to be drafted into the army, a prospect that held a minimum of charm for me since I fancied neither shooting nor being shot. The air force seemed a more peaceable alternative, and I wasn’t strongly averse to enlisting for the reason I stated earlier: I was bereft of appealing options.

In the year after severing ties with W&L (I didn’t hate the place, it just wasn’t the best fit for someone with my funky orientations and anarchic aesthetic), I’d done a bit of pre-beatnik hitchhiking (even writing a few pre-beatnik poems), labored briefly in the mail room of the Life Insurance Company of Virginia; and worked construction helping build and maintain electrical power plants and substations. I actually enjoyed construction, primarily for the camaraderie.

My fellow workers, though uneducated and unsophisticated, were funnier than a ruptured pipeline of laughing gas, offering witty and often insightful commentary on nearly every misstep, local and national, in life’s passing parade. Not one of them gave a braised pig’s knuckle that I could read Rilke in German, but they were loyal, stand-up guys who respected the fact that I’d dabbled in higher education, and who, I knew, always had my back. Going to work each morning was akin to attending a staff meeting of the Harvard Lampoon, if there were Harvard men who could keep you in stitches while threading pipe expertly or digging a ditch.

Enjoyable it might have been, but as I possess less mechanical aptitude than a rheumatoid squirrel monkey, my future in the construction trade was limited at best. Oh, and lest I forget, there was one other sharp stick prodding me toward enlistment: I’d recently gotten married.

The summer I turned twenty, I’d lost my virginity to a fetching, likewise virginal, Warsaw girl three years my junior. It being the 1950s, and it being rural Virginia, and we, Peggy and I, being middle class; well, in that time and under those circumstances, the popping of the cherry more often than not led to the popping of the question. Granted, I’d been a nonconformist practically since birth, but in this case I don’t know if I was rebelling against convention or bowing to it; yet for whatever reason, the prospect of a teenage wedding (and this was years before Chuck Berry sang about one) struck me as kind of cool, kind of wild.

I definitely wasn’t driven by conscience, by the shameful feeling that my wonton lust had soiled an innocent flower. Peggy wasn’t pregnant, and the truth is, she craved sexual intercourse as fervently as I. I’d say she craved it even more, except that such a claim would likely annoy Terry Gross.

Ms. Gross, of course, is the host of Fresh Air, the fine interview program on National Public Radio. The time I was a guest on the show, she seemed incredulous if not outright indignant when she asked if I really believed that women are more interested in sex than men are, as I’d had a character say in my novel Skinny Legs and All. I replied, “I don’t know but that’s what my women friends tell me.”

It was an honest answer, if a trifle incomplete. I should have said, “… that’s what my married women friends tell me.” As we’ve established in these pages, the second his biological urge is satisfied, many a husband is mentally if not physically out the door, lugging his bag of clubs. Especially if a ray of daylight persists in the sky. And when he yells “Fore!” you can bet your bottom credit card he isn’t crying out for more foreplay.

On a humid, blustery day (it was typhoon season) in the autumn of 1954, I landed in Japan. Two nights later, I landed again — this time without benefit of aircraft. The second landing, though unaffected by storm winds, was rougher, more perilous than the first. Let me explain.

While awaiting transport to various assigned installations in Korea, hundreds of us airmen were temporarily quartered in what amounted to a tent city, although the structures weren’t tents in the usual sense in that their bottom halves were wooden and seemingly permanent. From a height of about six feet upward, they were canvas, a heavy olive-drab tarpaulin material. Each unit slept twenty airmen, the cots lined up in two rows of ten with an aisle down the center. There were scores, maybe hundreds, of these half tents, and they all looked exactly alike. Only an identification number at each entrance distinguished one from all the others, but the numbers could be difficult to read in the dark.

Somewhere in the midst of Tent City, next to the huge mess hall, there was a canteen, the Pentagon being ever thoughtful when it comes to providing its troops with easy access to beer. By my second night in Japan, I was already so in love with the country (despite having thus far experienced precious little of it) that I downed an imprudent amount of suds, toasting my good fortune in finding myself in such an ancient and fascinating culture. At closing time, I went weaving back to my tent, where I quickly fell asleep, dreaming no doubt of geishas and Mount Fuji, in scenes resembling wood-block prints.

At some point during the night, a full bladder awakened me. I arose, located the latrine building, and proceeded to off-load my cargo. Now, my cot was immediately inside the entrance of my assigned tent, very first bunk on the right. Upon my return, I threw myself down on what I believed to be my mattress — only to land right on top of a sleeping man. The man screamed. Literally screamed. He believed, I’m sure, that he was being attacked by a Communist, or worse, was the victim of an attempted homosexual rape.

I pulled myself off him as quickly as I could manage it, being somewhat entangled in the man’s flailing arms and legs. Once free, I raced in a panic to the tent next door, which, luckily, proved to be the correct one, and dived into bed with my shoes on. There was some commotion outside, but it soon died down, and once my heart quit pounding and my breathing slowed, I quietly laughed myself to sleep.

At breakfast the next morning, I turned my head and discreetly chuckled again when I heard airmen asking, “Did you hear what happened to Sergeant Johansson last night?”

Later that day, just outside his tent, I came upon Sergeant Johansson himself. A gruff, tough-looking fellow in his thirties, he outranked me by three stripes and outweighed me by at least thirty pounds of what looked to be more muscle than fat. Walking ever so nonchalantly past him, I had no trouble suppressing even the faintest sign of amusement, though there definitely was a big red Japanese sun of a smile on the face behind my face.

In Korea, my assignment was to teach members of the South Korean air force the techniques of weather observation, including registering prevailing atmospheric conditions and encrypting, decoding, and plotting on maps meteorological data transmitted via shortwave radio from various observation sites around western Asia. To prepare me for this duty, the U.S. Air Force had sent me to its school near Chicago, where my classmates and I took two years of college meteorology in four months, attending classes eight hours a day, six days a week. This saturation process is called a “crash program,” and I can testify that it is a highly effective way to learn a subject.

I had arrived in Illinois in the middle of a program, so my future weather classmates and I had to wait eight weeks for the next program to begin. To keep us occupied, useful, and out of mischief in the interval, our commanding officer made certain we were available daily for either mess hall duty (KP) or something called “base beautification,” this latter consisting of tasks ranging from scouring every inch of the sprawling base for cigarette butts and other litter to raking leaves, heaving sacks of compost, and planting shrubbery. Base beautification could be sweaty physical labor or it could be a piddly existential bore. And while in both cases it was preferable to KP (The horror! The horror!), it was hardly the sort of mindless grunt work we’d envisioned we’d be performing when we eschewed the army for the air force. Guys were always faking toothaches or upset stomachs, or inventing other lame excuses to get out of it. To that end I hit upon a novel tactic that in certain circles might be regarded as brilliant.