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

RPI did not field a football team, not a single fraternity or sorority Greeked up the place, and it should go without saying that there was no dress code: “conventional dress” at RPI meant whatever the alley cat dragged in, and the La Bohème chic on display invited the city’s gentry and good ol’ boys alike to deride the school as a haven for degenerates of every persuasion. That characterization, as exaggerated as it was, only made the place dearer to the hearts of many students, for little encourages a bohemian more than to be misunderstood and maligned by squares. RPI had suited William Fletcher Jones and B.K., both alumni, and it was to suit me, as well, when I enrolled there soon after leaving the air force.

RPI’s student newspaper was called the Proscript, and I never knew what that meant either, although the name somehow made more sense than the Ring-tum Phi . In any case, I became editor in chief of the Proscript, and wrote a weekly column I entitled Walks on the Wild Side as a kind of tribute to Nelson Algren, arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. Like each and every Virginia school, private or public, RPI, for all of its air of nonconformity, was racially segregated. As protest, I and two of my fellow staffers on the Proscript, Pat Thomas and Ginger Foxwell, went to great lengths to sneak integrationist messages into the paper, and while some of them were so clever as to be almost entirely esoteric, we were nearly always caught.

As a result of this subversion, I was reprimanded with a C in journalism, which though it torpedoed my “straight A” average, didn’t ruin my chances in the job market. In fact, for most of my senior year I worked a full forty-hour week on the sports desk of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the state’s leading daily paper. Like all morning papers, the Times-Dispatch was produced at night. I worked from four in the afternoon until midnight, which is how I managed to carry an eighteen-hour class load despite full employment. It was a bit of a strain, however, and I was as happy as any kid in junior high when the school year finally ended.

Commencement exercises at RPI were slated for 10 A.M., and due to my schedule, I was of a mind to skip the ceremony, reasoning that I could profit more from sleep than walking across a stage for a perfunctory handshake and a parchment diploma. My pal Ginger Foxwell objected. She wanted like-minded company at the event. And when I claimed that I simply wouldn’t wake up in time to dress and make it to the civic auditorium (whose name, believe it or not, was the Mosque), she countered that she would send a friend by my apartment to rouse me and drive me to commencement. Sure enough, at nine-fifteen or thereabouts on the fateful day, there was a rapping, a tapping at my chamber door, and though Edgar Allan Poe had once called Richmond home, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a raven. Indeed, the figure my bleary eye saw through the peephole was a bird of quite a different feather.

Patricia was radical Ginger’s unlikely best friend, a married woman from suburbia. I’d met — and been beguiled by — her a month earlier when, after accepting a ride home from a party (I’d yet to replace the Kaiser), I’d ended up in the backseat beside her as the driver took his passengers on an inebriated joyride up and down the streets of the Fan. Patricia and I had chatted jovially, perhaps to conceal nervousness at the insane way the driver was taking corners, and when the car finally squealed to a stop at my address, we’d impulsively, unexpectedly kissed. It was intended to be casual, just a sociable good-night buss — but then the world might be a different place had Madame Curie discovered a new method for making cheese fondue rather than a recipe for radioactivity.

At the meeting of our lips, peacocks went into hiding, elephants suffered memory loss, camels developed a maddening thirst, and dinosaurs long thought to be extinct turned up on the evening news.

It could not have lasted for more than four or five seconds, yet this commingling of mouth meat, this musical clink of enamel against enamel, this slippery friction (for some reason always as startling as it is intimate) that occurs when tongues collide (surprise!) was epic, mythic, even biblical in its scope. A person could imagine seas parting, bushes burning, angels hovering, milk and honey flowing from a stone; imagine wheeling chariots, strikes of ancient lightning, and the lamb lying down with the lion in a field of crimson poppies. Those kissing such a kiss, transformed momentarily into a hairy god and a naked nymph slurping nectar from the same full cup, could imagine it lasting forty days and forty nights, though as indicated, it was over so quickly that the parties kissing could not be wholly certain it ever happened.

Now, weeks later, here Patricia stood in my doorway, dolled up in her go-to-commencement finery and wearing a smile that managed to be simultaneously timid, awkward, and seductive. In the time that elapsed as we stared at one another there, I could have received a half-dozen diplomas, a haircut, and a citation for loitering. Then, our heads bobbed toward one another, back and forth, like wary pigeons pecking at an ear of corn, until after a couple of near misses we connected and kissed for the second time that spring.

Patricia had married at sixteen, and now at twenty-two had three lovely children and a nice home in a lower-middle-class suburb. She also had a hole somewhere inside, down which a significant, formative, irreplaceable chunk of her young life had gone missing. Of course, in retrospect, that sounds like I’m making excuses for her. As for my own part in this, I must confess that when Moses threw that stone tablet at me — the one in which the Seventh Commandment had been plainly etched — I ducked and it sailed out the window.

Oh, I felt pangs of guilt all right, but I’d recently taken to reading Zen texts and while reading Zen is akin to reading swimming (in both cases one must eventually toss aside books and just leap off the dock), I was learning the wisdom of living in the moment. Moreover, in my moment of wavering hesitation, I could hear ol’ Billy Blake shouting all the way from the eighteenth century, “Kiss the joy as it flies.”

Suffice to say, I never made it to my college commencement. Due to graduate with honors, I chose dishonor instead, earning a postgraduate degree in adultery. Summa cum lotta .

The “Fan” in Fan District refers neither to the manufacture of those rotary appliances used to circulate air in enclosed architectural spaces nor to the handheld accessories whose primary function it is to cool down, and conceal the facial twitches of, overheated dowagers. Rather, it’s named for the way streets fan out in a radiating semicircle from Monroe Park, a green if soot-peppered oasis in the urban center of Richmond. It’s an old neighborhood in, by American standards, an old city, though one sumptuous with block after block of beautifully restored town houses, and enlivened by the student population of Virginia Commonwealth University (formerly RPI), along with the sort of shops and watering holes that cater to students; as well as to the artists, gays, and bohemians who have both enriched and stigmatized the area for decades.

When I think of the Fan, which I seem to persist in doing, I think primarily of its alleys. As charming as are its leafy streets, lined with renovated homes and almost audibly tramped by the ghost boots of long-dead Confederate officers, it is the alleyways dividing those streets that are responsible for the romance in my Richmond reveries. The images and moods most associated with the word “alley” — narrow, secluded, gritty, generally unlit, and often dangerous passageways populated by emaciated tomcats, garbage trucks, and thugs — do not entirely apply to the alleys of the Fan, which to this day are simultaneously inviting and forbidding, elegant and squalid, ominous and suffused with grace.