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

Incidentally, I’ve been fortunate enough to garner only one other rejection notice in my literary careen (a term I prefer to “career”). It arrived the following year in response to a poem I’d submitted to the New Yorker . As I recall, the poem went something like this:

At the bat of your lashes peacocks preen.

Peacocks preen, elephants remember,

camels go for days without water,

and dinosaurs of all types become extinct.

Although I’ve never pretended to be a poet, I’m still on the fence about whether or not the New Yorker poetry editor made the right decision.

My first car, that fifty-dollar hummer, was a 1947 Kaiser. A what? Yeah, a Kaiser, a six-cylinder folly (mine seemed to hit on no more than three) manufactured near Detroit between 1945 and 1953. It looked like the illegitimate child of a sperm whale and a pizza oven, and was built so low to the ground you actually had to step down to get into it: it was not unlike entering a sunken living room or boarding one of those Tunnel of Love boats at an amusement park.

At the time, I was dating a cute little WAF, and when I say “little” I’m not being colloquial: measuring just four feet eleven inches, it’s surprising Bunnie was allowed in the air force. When she sat beside me in that low-riding Kaiser nobody could tell she was in the car. From outside, you couldn’t even see the top of her head. As a consequence, rumor spread through my squadron that “Robbins drives around all over Omaha yakking to himself.” It’s fortunate, I guess, that they were unaware of my history with the talking stick.

If that rumor contributed to the fact that I was the only airman in my unit not to receive a reenlistment lecture, I couldn’t say. There were, however, reasons why my extended military service went unsolicited. I was good at my job, always arrived on time, and despite a couple of citations for refusing to wear a hat (I felt like a Tijuana bus driver in those low-class lids), I presented a clean, neat, pleasant countenance to my comrades and superiors. True, but a cheerful, generally compliant disposition apparently could not disguise the irrepressible bohemian vapors that now wafted from the pits of my flesh, effluvia interpreted by some as passive insubordination and others as covert anti-authoritarianism. It didn’t help matters that names such as Freud, Picasso, and Stravinsky were occasionally popping up in my conversation. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t American. It wasn’t right .

Charges of “intellectual snobbery” escalated after I innocently asked a sergeant which he considered worse, conspicuous consumption or conspicuous nonconsumption. (I’d been reading Margaret Mead.) From the way the guy waxed livid with hostility, one would have thought I’d inquired if he believed Uncle Sam was a lesbian.

On the other hand, I may not have received a reenlistment sales pitch because it was so obviously a waste of time, and never mind that the prospect of wasting time has rarely if ever stopped anybody in the military. At any rate, the air force awarded me an honorable discharge (poor compensation for the fact that I’d received only two promotions in four years); I shipped my belongings to my parents’ address, sold the Kaiser to a junkyard for fifteen bucks, shook hands with my buddies, kissed the little WAF good-bye, and hitchhiked back to Richmond, perhaps passing on the road Neal Cassady or Jack Kerouac, an exciting and soon-to-be-famous new breed of bohemians.

If I, indeed, crossed paths with representatives of the Beat Generation while thumbing from Nebraska to Virginia, I failed to recognize them as such. I did, however, encounter an old gentleman whom the Beats might well have found worthy of praise.

On a chilly morning (despite it being early June) in eastern Kentucky, I was stranded on the outskirts of a small city, stranded because it was Saturday and all the traffic was heading into town so that the coal miners, moonshiners, hardscrabble farmers and their families could attend to their Saturday shopping (a weekly ritual), while I was heading in the opposite direction. Pickup after pickup passed me by, the cab of each one crowded past the point of legality with parents, grandparents, and perhaps other kin; the truck beds full of children, bundled against the fresh mountain air. More often than not, drivers honked at me and their children waved. Occasionally, one of the kids would shout, “Hey, soldier boy!” Although I was officially now a civilian, I was wearing my uniform because it helped in getting rides.

The friendly reception warmed my heart — these were in a sense my people — but the rest of me was becoming chilled to the marrow. Eventually, I turned on a numb heel and took temporary refuge in an unpainted old general store a short way down the road. General stores, all but extinct now, differed from today’s convenience stores in that they stocked considerably less junk food, considerably more household staples. This one in Kentucky sold everything from sacks of potatoes to gallons of kerosene, from flour and school notebooks to mousetraps and sugar. I bought a Milky Way candy bar and was eating it beside the potbellied stove when the aforementioned elderly gentleman walked in.

If central casting had been searching for a man to play opposite Granny Robbins, this was their guy. Tall, lean, stubble-faced, and gray, he was clad in faded bib overalls and actually carried a squirrel rifle. He was chewing a “chaw of ’backy,” and, as he possessed a deficit of teeth, tobacco juice dribbled in brown rivulets down his chin. When he shuffled up to the counter, the clerk smiled hospitably, and asked, “How are you today, Uncle Ben?” Whereupon Uncle Ben replied, “ ’Bout dead, thank ye.”

There was not a spot of self-pity in his answer, not a hint of despair, and while there was a detectable twinkle in his eye, it was the glow of equanimity not the glint of irony. Throughout the history of Zen, there’s been an emphasis on the impermanent nature of all life, all things, and though I surely don’t wish to portray Uncle Ben as some kind of camouflaged Zen master, there was in his tone and his being a good-natured, slightly amused acceptance of inevitable impermanence.

It was the briefest of moments and more than five decades have passed, yet I’ve obviously never forgotten Uncle Ben because when I’m laid up with the flu or some other affliction and a friend calls to ask how I am, I automatically answer, with an appropriate twang, “ ’Bout dead, thank ye.” It never fails to make me feel better.

Few readers will have heard of Richmond Professional Institute. Even before RPI locked arms with the Medical College of Virginia in 1968 to become the vastly larger, more comprehensive Virginia Commonwealth University, it wasn’t widely known, though it was Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the Sorbonne rolled into one for aspiring artists in the southeastern U.S.; and in many ways it was the ideal school for incipient bohemians looking for a friendly academic environment in which to unpack those tender roots.

First of all, it was an urban college, its campus brick, stone, and asphalt; nary a blade of grass to remind a student of suburbia, small-town repression, or cornball life back on the farm. Most of its classes were taught (many still are) in former private homes, grand old three-story houses resplendent with ornate staircases, cupolas, balconies, and bay windows convenient for checking to see if the Yankees were coming. Secondly, it was a professional school, which is to say there were no required courses in English, math, or a foreign language. From day one a freshman was immersed in his or her chosen field — and frequently that field was art, drama, or music. Degrees were offered in advertising and retailing, in journalism and fashion design, and its department of social work had a wide reputation, but it was its curriculum in the arts that gave RPI its flavor, a flavor unsuited to everyone’s palate in Richmond, one of the most proper, conservative cities in America.