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

When our unit would report to a noncommissioned officer in charge of a particular base beautification project, each of us, individually, would be required to sign his name on a duty roster. At noon, we’d break for lunch, after which there’d be a roll call to assure that every one of us had returned to work as ordered. At no point in this operation were IDs checked. So one morning I signed the roster not as Thomas E. Robbins but as “R. M. Rilke,” betting that not one of the authorities involved would have heard of the Austrian poet. After lunch, I slipped away to the base theater and watched a matinee.

The following day, at my unit’s early-morning formation, nobody noticed the twinkle in my eye when our own NCO ordered “Airman Rilke” to report to the orderly room, presumably to defend his unexcused absence from base beautification. Perfect! And the next time we future weathermen were assigned to a laborious beautification detail, I signed in as “Feodor Dostoyevsky.” After lunch, I traipsed over to the gym and shot baskets, knowing that I might have to bite my tongue to keep from snickering at the way our sergeant would pronounce “Dostoyevsky” the following morning. I only regretted that I couldn’t be privy to the consternation “Rilke” and “Dostoyevsky” surely must have caused in our orderly room.

Not wishing to arouse suspicion. I skipped a day or two now and then and returned to the shovel and the rake, but over the following weeks “Alexander Pope,” “Leo Tolstoy,” and “Oscar Wilde” were all cited for being AWOL from base beautification — while I passed sweet afternoons seeing the latest Hollywood films and improving my jump shot. Who says a literary education doesn’t have practical applications?

Any American air force pilot, having been alerted in a weather briefing to the presence of a storm system in his flight path, would take pains to circumnavigate it. South Korean pilots, on the other hand, being fatalistic both by temperament and religious training, would just fly right into the storm.

At least that was the case in the 1950s. With that stoic approach to aviation prevalent in their officers, my students could be forgiven for caring no more about meteorology than kittens might care about string theory.

Nevertheless, we had to go through the motions, which we did in rotating eight-hour shifts: day, swing, and midnight (weather doesn’t sleep). The question soon became, “What to do,” my students and I, “to keep from boring each other to transcultural tears?” I’m unsure whose idea it was, but for a while — in between recording and transmitting temperatures, dew points, and wind directions — the locals amused themselves by teaching me to swear in Korean. More than a half century later, I still remember those naughty words, which is a trifle odd as I’ve had scant opportunity to put them into practice and have been known to criticize profanity as representing a paucity of vocabulary and destitution of wit.

Eventually, however, we discovered a diversion that was not only mutually satisfying but profitable. Moreover, it struck a symbolic blow against Cold War communism, being a working example of capitalistic principles on a democratically fundamental plane. We took up black marketing.

The PX at K-2 Air Force Base occupied a Quonset hut set on treeless, ever-brown land, presenting a rigidly militaristic demeanor to the world: no nonsense, no frills. Inside, though, it offered for sale at discount prices a fair number of the familiar items that average Americans considered essential to their pursuit of happiness if not their actual survival. These would include Camel, Pall Mall, Kool, and Marlboro cigarettes. Regulations permitted each airman on K-2 to purchase two cartons of cigarettes a month, a rule irrelevant in my case since I didn’t smoke. Well, one day a student named Kim (come to think of it, each and every one of my students was named Kim; in fact, I believe every man, woman, and child in Korea was named Kim in 1955, and that may still be the case for all I know); this particular Kim fellow came to me and very shyly suggested that were I to provide him with a carton of Marlboros, he would pay me more than twice the price charged by the PX.

Now, I’m not much of a businessman — life is entirely too short to be used up in shallow pursuit of monetary favor — but this transaction sounded easy enough and, hey, this Kim, though not uniquely christened, was a good-natured soul who’d giggled like a schoolgirl when instructing me how to say “motherfucker” in his native tongue.

Let’s not drag this out. Soon I was supplying Kim with not only my two monthly cartons but cigarettes I’d purchased at face value from other nonsmokers in my outfit. Before long, we were dealing in toilet articles as well. They, in fact, commanded a better price than the smokes. Bear in mind that South Korea at that time was an impoverished, war-torn country with nothing remotely resembling a modern manufacturing sector, and from its sheer volume, it was obvious that the stuff I sold to Kim was being resold to a third party or parties.

Conducting business at the weather station would have been risky for us both, so I’d conceal the merchandise in a laundry bag and schlep it to a rendezvous at a Korean civilian laundry located some twenty or thirty yards down the unpaved road that led in and out of K-2. Most of the airmen had their clothes washed there, and guards at the gate didn’t notice that I seemed to be soiling my duds at many times the rate of the average airman.

I suppose I should emphasize that this enterprise was wee potatoes. Bantam feed. A mafia don wouldn’t have wiped his wife’s poodle’s butt on it. But entertainment was cheap in those postwar years in Asia, and my illicit earnings, meager as they were, afforded me excellent sukiyaki dinners, Kabuki performances, and lovely female companionship when I would travel to Japan on leave. It wasn’t until near the end of my tour of duty that I learned that most of our contraband, especially the toilet articles, was ending up behind the bamboo curtain in what was then Red China. Brand me a traitor if you must, but I figure that for eight or nine months I was supplying Mao Zedong with his Colgate toothpaste.

In the weather observers’ barracks at K-2, a poker game was almost always in progress. One of the most ardent poker players was an affable, roughhewn Southern lad named Jody. Between weather station duty and incessantly chasing a royal flush, Jody hadn’t time for much else, including writing to his girlfriend back in North Carolina, so he offered me five bucks (his luck had been good that week) if I’d write to Sue Ellen in his stead.

Since my interest in cards has been pretty much limited to wild cards (figuratively speaking), I rarely sat at the poker table, preferring to spend my leisure hours at the service club, flirting with bargirls and drinking beer; or, when in the barracks, pursuing my newfound interest in Japanese aesthetics, including trying to understand and assimilate such concepts as wabi-sabi (the art of finding beauty in things that are imperfect, incomplete, humble, or unconventional), a practice, with its undertones of “crazy wisdom,” that continues to absorb me today. However, a young American male can only wabi so much sabi, and my rinky-dink black-market ring wasn’t time-consuming, so I consented to write to the fair Sue Ellen on Jody’s behalf — on one condition: he must sign and post the epistle without reading it. He agreed.

Refraining from waxing so poetic as to arouse her suspicion, I told Sue Ellen how much I (Jody) loved and missed her, but that I (Jody) was proud to be serving my country so that American values might endure. Skipping any reference to poker, I included a few lines about the base and work, but they struck me as dull. I felt that the letter could use a bit of color, some tidbit to intrigue and delight.