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

There’s an area of urban Richmond known as the Fan District, a charming neighborhood, by and large, and home to the largest concentration of artists and arty hangers-on between New York and New Orleans. (Of the Fan I’ll have more stories to tell later: I came to live there in 1957 after my discharge from the air force.) Peggy was taking lessons in ballroom dancing, and it was a gay dance instructor named Chubby, though he was as skinny as a chopstick, who initiated her into the Fan party scene. On my second night back, following my cross-country bus ride, Peggy let me tag along to a gathering at a painting studio. Within an hour, she’d disappeared, and I did not see her again that evening, but the sting of being abandoned was lessened considerably by my acute fascination with the odd new world into which I’d been dumped. It was bohemia, baby, and while I wasn’t exactly wonder-struck, I was undeniably captivated.

In Japan, I’d marveled at wood-block prints, but until that evening in Richmond, I’d seen modern paintings only in reproductions, and not many of those. A Hokusai print is exquisite in its draftsmanship and poignant in the way it penetrates and distills the very essence of nature, but such refinement can be drowned out by the sheer bravura of a big modern canvas, especially one upon which the paint is so fresh it’s sticky to the touch; and in that Fan studio I was surrounded by actual original paintings, some hanging, a couple half finished on easels, some propped against the walls. From that night on, the mingled aroma of oil paint and turpentine, with its hint of mystery, its suggestion of activities unfolding outside the realm of normal expectations, has been an intoxicating perfume to me.

Furnished with three rickety wooden chairs and a stained sofa that had seen too much and forgotten too little, the studio’s main room, uncarpeted and spattered with paint of various hues, was the epicenter of the party. There, the motley-garbed guests — not one in a military uniform or “conventional dress” à la W&L — sipped beer and cheap red wine (marijuana would not infiltrate Richmond for another decade) while listening to an LP recording of a singer with a voice so wretched I thought it must be some kind of joke. (The singer’s name was Billie Holiday, and before my leave was up, having probably heard her a dozen more times, I was so completely crazy about her I’d purchased one of her albums, even though, like the shoplifter at W&L, I didn’t own a record player: for me, disorientation has all too often been the beginning of love.)

The party was only moderately noisy, although the buzz of otherwise serious conversation would periodically be interrupted by shouted non sequiturs, proclamations of a bizarre, surrealistic nature, followed by appreciative chuckling. Between the mad poetic outbursts, ideas were being tumbled like gemstones in a lapidary, discussion salted with names such as Freud, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Since in air force barracks guys talked mainly about cars, sports teams, and girlfriends — in that order — this dialogue was a refreshment to me, a tonic; and when I overheard Henry Miller mentioned, I jumped in with a few comments of my own.

Almost nobody else present had actually read Miller (the Grove Press paperback edition of Tropic of Cancer wouldn’t be published until 1961), and my firsthand observations made enough of an impression that when on the following evening, sans Peggy, I knocked on the studio door, I was recognized and admitted. Welcome to bohemia, Tommy Rotten.

I spent the last three weeks of my leave in that milieu, most particularly with the two painters who lived and worked in the studio I now visited daily, a larger-than-life pair named William Fletcher Jones and William Philip Kendrick, and with whom I would establish lasting friendships.

Jones looked like Dylan Thomas with a receding hairline and an exceeding waistline. A big brooding hulk, he would puff his jowls malevolently and bulge his hyperthyroid eyes until he resembled a hippopotamus rising from the ooze, then unfold his meaty lips to emit one of those nervous little nearly silent giggles with which certain jazz drummers vent their ecstasy at the terminus of an especially complicated riff. The giggles customarily followed some nonsensical — obtuse, at any rate — remark about life or art, though for Jones the line between the two was virtually nonexistent. He was to become rather well known for semiabstract cityscapes, charged with tension and electricity and executed in brilliant, juicy hues, although at the time he was painting courting lovers, realistic couples in every aspect except for their heads, which were featureless eggs.

As for Kendrick, whom his friends called “B.K.,” he was obsessed with the image of the dancer Nijinsky in the role of Petrouchka, the brokenhearted clown who for one shining moment sat upon the golden throne of God, a subject he has painted literally hundreds of times. B.K. was (and is) himself a clown, albeit a shy one: at odd moments he would jump up, click his heels together, and pirouette in a silly little dance, at the conclusion of which he would glance about the room with an anxious smile, like a child half expecting to be punished for inappropriate exuberance. Indeed, his round face almost perpetually exhibited the wide-eyed gaze and surprised smile of an astonished child, one who might have had his blindfold removed to find himself in a castle filled with ice cream, puppies, and toys.

B.K.’s sensitive baby face was all the more incongruous in that he was a state champion weight lifter, bulky muscles like hibernating armadillos concealed in the folds of his baggy duds. When ten years later we would move to New York together (I detoured to Richmond to pick him up on my way from Seattle), he would cadge drinks for us by walking the length of cocktail bars on his hands, somehow managing not to tip over any of the beverages resting thereupon. A one-hand stand on a bar stool was almost always good for a rum-and-Coke or a pint of Guinness, which we’d divide into two smaller glasses. It was in token repayment for this procurement that I partially dedicated my first novel to him in 1971.

At this writing, B.K. is well past eighty and we’ve been pals for more than half a century, a friendship that some may find a bit… well, bohemian; considering, as I eventually learned, that it was B.K. who had impregnated my wife when I was in Korea.

One morning when I was six, I awoke to find it spring. When I’d fallen asleep it was winter still, but sometime during the night, like a tipsy debutante sneaking home late from a ball, her hair undone, her green gown billowing, a song in her heart and a dreamy yet defiant smile on her face, spring had returned to Blowing Rock.

I’d been sick for nearly a week with the flu, and my mother, ever the nurse, thought I needed at least one more day in bed. Maybe, but when I saw through my bedroom window that the world outside had come alive, that it had taken on an insect quality, everywhere buzzing and budding, I wanted to claim a place in the sun. So, I opened the window (my room was on the first floor), jumped outside, and to Mother’s horror, went running, cavorting, and cartwheeling around and around the yard in my underwear.

For those high jinks, I paid with a scolding, a denial of promised ice cream, and an extra day in bed under observation to assure that my little escapade hadn’t brought on pneumonia. It was totally worth it.

My encounter with bohemia and the bohemians was to have a similar effect on me. Herb Gold, the late San Francisco author, wrote this: “In all the interstices of a society that still requires art, imagination, laziness, adventure, and possibility unwilled by family and employment, the bohemian unpacks his tender roots.” Is not Gold’s expression “tender roots” suggestive of spring?