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

Inspired, I added that I had recently captured a snake and was keeping it in my laundry bag as a pet. It was pretty, I wrote, a cousin of the North Carolina king snake, and that I fed it mice I trapped in a nearby rice paddy, as well as eggs pilfered from the mess hall. Then, as a final romantic touch, I wrote that I (again, Jody) had named the snake “Sue Ellen” in her honor.

He never heard from her again.

Although he whined a few times about a broken heart, Jody soon quickly lost himself — and Sue Ellen — in the shuffling and dealing; whereas I felt I’d done a good deed, saving a fellow airman perhaps from marriage to an unimaginative, not to mention unappreciative, wife.

For several weeks, I was detached to a joint armed forces communications center in downtown Taegu, third largest city in South Korea. It was a wonderful deployment in that I got to walk to work every morning through narrow streets paved with stone and raucous with life, a sensorium of undulating exotica. Everywhere there was the rattling of carts, some pulled by shaggy ponies, most by old bearded papa-sans in baggy white britches and stovepipe hats. Pushing aside rice-paper screens, extended families poured from single-story houses, the women in long, very high-waisted skirts and tight-fitting brocade jackets worn under a looser jacket of quilted cotton. (Bargirls and prostitutes, of which there were great numbers in Taegu, wore Western-style dresses — usually gifts from GI boyfriends who ordered them from Sears catalogs — but these larks of the night seldom ventured out before noon.)

My nose, even my eyes, filled with smoke from hibachi pots, with the pungent breath of kimchi crocks, and with the sweet-sour redolence of unidentifiable spices, lotions, tonics, oils, dyes, and bodily effluvia: strange smells to complement the strange language whose stick-figure letters jitterbugged on wooden and paper signs in every direction and whose intonations burst in the air around me like invisible cannonades.

Some mornings early on in my deployment, I’d get lost in the alleys and teeming jingle-jangle of it all, and not knowing how to ask directions, would wander in the multitudes until I saw a particular little bridge or an old car without wheels and realized that’s where I must turn left and climb the hill to the communications center. More often than not, I was late for work. As I said, it was wonderful.

On that assignment, I was quartered on an army post, there being no air force presence in the city, and commuting from K-2 would have been a hassle even though it was no more than ten or twelve miles away: too many pushcarts, bicycles, and pedestrians jamming the road. Nights, when I wasn’t on the futon of some cute bargirl, I slept in transit quarters, located on the second floor of a large, ugly, gray stone building, a relic of the Japanese occupation (1910–1945). I shared those temporary quarters — a long, cold room with about thirty bunks, most of them empty — with members of the U.S. Army all-Korea boxing team.

Having each won a Korean Command championship in his weight division, the boxers were training to fight the Japanese Command champs, the winners of those bouts then traveling to Germany to take on the top army pugilists in Europe. Trained by an Italian American with a Bronx accent as heavy as a subway car, these guys took their conditioning seriously, some of them perhaps dreaming of a professional prizefighting career once they were discharged from the army. They were good roommates, however, funny and friendly and always trying hard not to wake skinny, noncombatant me when they arose at 5 A.M. to do their roadwork.

Sharing quarters with the military boxers made me feel as if I were living in the pages of From Here to Eternity, the monumental opus by James Jones that critics unfortunately and in some cases no doubt snobbishly never mention when listing contenders for the title of “Great American Novel.” But, then, writing fiction is not a boxing tournament, is it? Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.

Very late one night, well past the Cinderella curfew, our peaceful quarters were invaded by about ten young greenhorn privates, not long in the army and fresh off the troopship from the U.S. Somewhere in their journey from the port of Inchon to Taegu, they’d managed to consume a large quantity of beer, and they were as loud and stupid as nineteen-year-olds can be when inexperienced with the caprices of ethyl alcohol. Add to that the giddiness they surely felt at being left temporarily unsupervised in, for the first time in their lives, a foreign land, and you have a recipe for elevated levels of obnoxiousness. Their horselaughs, their drunken vulgarity, their banging about, their smartass retorts when asked politely to quiet down and switch off the lights, failed to enchant the awakened boxers, whose arduous workday on the road and in the gym would commence with the pink prickling of dawn.

As the juvenile jackassery continued, I, beneath my government-issue blankets, chuckled softly. One needn’t be prescient to know how this was going to end.

It ended quickly. With no wasted motion, boxers slipped out of bed, slowly crossed the room, and WHUMP! WHOOSH! SURPRISE! Single well-placed punches to the midsection let the air out of three or four of the raucous rookies with a sound like that of exploding tires. Deflated, the brats fell backward against their astounded comrades or onto their clattering bunks. Then, piñatas smashed, fiesta canceled, lights summarily extinguished, the newcomers briefly grumbled under their breath and passed out; while the boxers went back to dreaming of title fights, flashbulbs, tabloid headlines, and million-dollar purses, or at least how their fists were going to get them the hell out of Korea. And I, for the second time since arriving in Asia, laughed myself to sleep.

There was something else besides Sears catalog fashions that distinguished Taegu bargirls and set them apart from their more virtuous peers: namely their breath. These enterprising ladies, unlike their fellow countrymen young and old, one and all, did not eat kimchi. Their abstention was a dietary sacrifice of enormous proportions, yet entirely necessary if they wished to socialize with American servicemen, which is to say, if they wished to prosper financially.

Kimchi has been called the national condiment or side dish of Korea, but it’s considerably more than that. It’s a defining characteristic, more gastronomically representative of Korea than salsa is of Mexico or garlic of Italy. Though less so today than in past periods when money and meat were scarce, kimchi has been a Korean way of life.

Traditionally, kimchi was napa cabbage that, seasoned with hot chilies and garlic and soaked in brine, was buried in an earthenware crock for several months or until fermentation occurred. There are variations in which radishes, turnips, and/or cucumbers are added to the cabbage, but the fermentation is essential — and the effect is the same: after one has eaten kimchi, one’s breath could run a train. It could also run off any GI, marine, or airman — no matter how romantically inclined, how fervently propelled forward by testosterone — who happened to find his olfactory receptors enveloped in an alien halitosis so powerful it could pour a tank of herbicide on the reddest rose of passion.

Kissing a kimchi eater is one thing, eating kimchi is another, and while I was not all together unlike my fellow servicemen in my aversion to the former, I came to join the ranks of the latter, introduced at my insistence to the indomitable dish by a darling girl who called herself “Sally” (odds are her real name was Kim), and whose warnings I ignored, creating some displeasure at the weather station since my entire supply of Listerine mouthwash was being funneled to Chairman Mao.