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

I continue to eat kimchi today, albeit by necessity the made-in-America version. American kimchi? Indeed, it’s possible to find refrigerated jars of the stuff in a fair number of U.S. supermarkets and specialty food stores, especially on the West Coast; and while it can add piquancy to tuna sandwiches or bowls of pork with steamed rice, it’s pretty much a pale shadow of the authentic Korean product. The problem is that here the ingredients have rarely been fermented. It’s possible today to ferment cabbage without burying it in the ground all winter (a Vietnamese woman in La Conner, Washington, made me some in her garage: moonshine kimchi), but in deference to Yankee sensibilities, most preserved cabbage in this country (in Japan, as well) is actually pickled rather than fermented. I call it “kimchi lite.”

Kimchi lite is to authentic Korean kimchi what a lapdog is to a timber wolf, what a billiards game is to a rugby match, what Disneyland is to Burning Man, what a golf cart is to a hot-rod Lincoln, what the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is to the Rolling Stones, what a sparkler is to a thunder cracker, what Curious George is to King Kong, what… well, you get the picture. Kimchi lite can enliven a tuna sandwich but hard-core Korean kimchi rocks the world.

“You eat kimchi,” Sally warned me, “you wife-san no like you. She catchy catchy ’nother man.” The petite bargirl had laughed uproariously when I swallowed my first bite of kimchi. (“I cry for funny,” she gasped), but she was seriously prophetic in regard to my wife, although Peggy’s animosity had zero to do with Korean cuisine. Or with Korean bargirls, for that matter. We were drifting — no, motorboating — apart before I’d gone abroad.

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it’s to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic. Peggy was thoroughly unimpressed when I won an air force short-story contest; I quietly scoffed at her fashion magazines, her fascination with the financial potential of Florida real estate. (I’d been stationed at a base outside of Orlando, tracking potential hurricanes.) The sporadic letters she’d sent me in Korea were approximately as affectionate as a foreclosure notice. Written with a blunt instrument. Dipped in zombie blood.

Returning home aboard a troopship bound for Seattle, I’d scored a gig as editor of the ship’s newspaper (a thin mimeographed rag distributed daily), thereby avoiding both KP and nightly internment down in the fart-infested rat warrens where troops were stacked like cordwood: I instead shared a comfortable cabin with a trio of medics. Under the nom de plume “Figmo Fosdick,” I also wrote a satirical humor column called Shipboard Confidential, which, though popular with the troops, frequently put me at odds with the paper’s adviser, a Roman Catholic chaplin who possessed the purplish physiognomy and perpetually petulant pucker of the overly zealous censor. I wouldn’t insinuate that the good priest ever touched a choirboy, but he certainly molested my prose.

At any rate, I had little time for contemplation during the crossing, so when after a fortnight we docked in Seattle, I elected to take a Greyhound bus to Virginia, thereby saving airfare and giving myself four uninterrupted days on the road to ponder my situation.

Prior to my deployment to Asia, Peggy had been my one and only sexual partner. Now I’d rolled on the futon with five Korean girls — Kim, Kim, Kim, Kim, and Sally — and an extremely lovely Japanese woman named Reiko. I’d “sown my wild oats,” to borrow that dated agrarian phrase, and was thinking that I was now ready to “settle down,” to employ another grandpa expression, with Peggy and our son Rip (born just before I shipped out to Korea), and “build a life” (the clichés just kept on rolling). Moreover, when I finally arrived in Richmond, I took one look at Peggy and fell in love with her all over again. Alas, the feelings were less than mutual.

The frigidity of my welcome would have inspired the hardiest Eskimo to huddle with the sled dogs. Peggy had been strewing some feral cereal of her own it seems, and was, in fact, pregnant with another man’s child. Deserved or not, the rejection ripped through my heart like a rusty can opener, wounding me so deeply that for years thereafter it would pop up like a jeering jack in my dreams.

You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn’t evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

Hmmm. That last sentence reminds me of my gallbladder.

In 2006, an ultrasound exam discovered enough stones in my gallbladder to pave a Zen walkway. A few weeks later, I had the rock-strewn organ removed. The surgery went well, but I was kept in the hospital overnight. I was also pumped full of happy juice. The drug’s identity I do not know, but with it singing in my veins, pushing my mental pedal to the metal, I was merrily awake all night long, during which time I wrote an entire self-help book in my head.

I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating. Hour after hour, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, chapter after chapter, I composed an entire self-help book. Toward dawn, I finally fell asleep, however, and when they woke me several hours later, the only part of the book I could recall was its title: How to Lose Every Hand and Still Come Out a Winner.

That’s correct: How to Lose Every Hand and Still Come Out a Winner . If only I could have remembered the accompanying text, there is no doubt whatsoever that the book would have sold twenty million copies and placed me in the company of mega-motivator Tony Robbins. Maybe that’s why I forgot it.

Upon returning from overseas in 1955, I stumbled into an America I had barely known existed, a country within a country; or more precisely, a state within a state; a state of being that is usually referred to as “bohemia,” although it has nothing to do with Czechoslovakia, and of which I have remained to this day a denizen. (“Citizen” is too licit a word, and anyway, when necessary I’ve managed to keep one foot in mainstream bourgeois society, which is to say, in enemy territory.)

Now, I’d checked out Greenwich Village in the months before my juvenile marriage, but the place had seemed more foreign to me then than Japan or Korea; and having no guide, no interpreter, no valid passport, nor even a proper frame of reference, I wasn’t merely an outsider, I was like a deaf man at the opera or a blind man at the circus. Ironically, it was my estranged wife who introduced me to what would in a few years be labeled (and often libeled) as the “counterculture.” A materialist Peggy might have been, but she was also a party girl, and in conservative Richmond it was the bohemian artists and intellectuals, genuine or fake, who hosted — informally, of course — the liveliest and most frequent soirees.