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

(Sociologists should note that these high jinks occurred several years before marijuana, let alone psychedelics, became available in Richmond.)

It’s just as well that I can’t recall any of my own contributions to the Language Wheel, although I did participate despite my inconvenient hours of gainful employment. Between eleven-thirty and twelve on a Saturday night, a friend would go to the telephone booth just inside the Village’s entrance and ring up the newsroom at the Times-Dispatch . When he or she had me on the phone, I’d be informed of the location of that night’s party, and usually I’d head directly to that address as soon as I got off work. Over time, those parties all have run together in my memory, but two do remain distinct.

One summer night, just as a Language Wheel was getting under way on a rooftop on Grace Street, a great Southern storm rolled in. Saw blades of lightning stabbed the heavens with the mania of a serial killer, followed by Wagnerian crashes of thunder. Those in the wheel exchanged cautious looks but nobody wanted to be the first to break the circle. Then the charcoal belly of the sky split open and from the gash there gushed torrents of rain. In a matter of seconds everyone was drenched, yet the circle refused to break, proving perhaps that poets, even inept amateur poets, are tougher than the athletes who play professional baseball.

Eventually, however, the improvised lines of free verse became essentially inaudible, sounding as if they were being delivered underwater. By irritated dolphins. When a mouth opened to speak a line, one could almost see bubbles escaping, and Paul’s flute seemed to be imitating a faulty pump in a swimming pool. But I’m pleased to report that it wasn’t until the storm had passed that we fools sloshed off to our respective flats, dorm rooms, and rented carriage houses in various parts of the Fan, leaving behind the beer cans and bottles on which we’d drummed our own silly little bohemian thunder.

Then there was the time someone called me at the paper earlier than usual to disclose that that night’s party was already under way at a private residence in Windsor Farms, an ultra-tony suburban neighborhood in Richmond’s upscale far West End. This wasn’t entirely unprecedented. Occasionally a lawyer, surgeon, or corporate executive — someone who ought to know better — would invite a few colorful crazies from the Village to one of their parties, thinking that their regular guests might find the infidels amusing. They usually came to regret the impulse, especially after their home was invaded by maybe twenty thirsty hipsters when they’d been expecting six or seven.

This particular party was on its last legs when I finally arrived at the house, a lovely white brick Tudor, a style much favored by Richmond’s anglophilic elite. My friends, I was told, were all out on the patio. I thought I detected the sounds of a Language Wheel in progress there, but was in no rush to find out, being not merely sober but hungry enough to eat one of the gold-framed fox-hunting prints off of the living room wall. Into the deserted dining room I went, directed by raw instinct. Sure enough, a big bowl of creamy dip sat there on the dining room table, but, alas, the rest of the hors d’oeuvres had all been consumed. Not one cracker or chip remained, let alone a carrot stick or stalk of celery. Still, that dip looked mighty tasty. If only…

There was one other item on the table. Right in the center, a single medium-size chrysanthemum blossom of exceptional hue floated in a porcelain saucer. I recalled then that in Japan chrysanthemum flowers were not only eaten but considered a delicacy. I hesitated, but not for long. Snatching up the blossom, I plunged it in the dip and took a bite. Umm? Not bad. I repeated the process and was on my third chomp when I heard footsteps. The host was entering the room.

Instinctively, I hid the ragged remains of the blossom behind my back. The host gasped. “Where’s my mum?” he demanded of no one in particular. Perhaps he was appealing to angels on high. I shook my head and as I did so he noticed the several petals now clinging to my dip-smeared lips.

That chrysanthemum, I was soon to learn, had won first prize in the annual prestigious Richmond Flower Show that very afternoon: it was a blue ribbon champion of which the man was inordinately proud. The way he carried on, I might just as well have eaten his wife and kids.

I left without saying good-bye.

Although it was at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the Village Inn; at the opposite end, in fact, from just about any spectrum one might suggest, there was in the Fan another dispenser of liquid refreshment (or so it seemed) that sued for my attention. I dubbed the place “Il Palazzo della Contessa di Pepsi,” but it displayed no name outside or in, and was overall so nondescript that there were times when I doubted its existence.

It was the lone commercial establishment on a quiet, shady residential block a fair distance west of RPI and the Village, and thus largely unknown to both students and bohemians. Its clientele? I’m not certain who were its customers, if any, for while it appeared to be in business, it was so marginally so that its identity as a “commercial establishment” is subject to question. Occupying a storefront on the ground floor of an old town house, long since converted to rental apartments, there was, as I’ve indicated, neither signage nor any other reference to the merchandise for sale therein.

The proprietor of the store, my “contessa,” was an elderly woman, though not so elderly, so frail, or so obviously batty that I might blame dementia for the fact that she chose to sell nothing at all except Pepsi-Cola. And the bottles of Pepsi, of which there were a great number, weren’t even refrigerated. This was not a place where on a sultry Richmond day you could pop in for a cold pop. Yet cases and six-packs of Pepsi, stacked high and frosted only with dust, lined the walls on either side, while individual bottles (never a can) marked time on shelves behind the equally dusty counter.

Adding to the intrigue were the shop’s hours. The contessa (the sobriquet was mildly sarcastic, for she was plain in dress and demeanor) elected — for reasons I assume known to her alone — to open her doors from 10:17 to 11:53 in the morning, 2:36 to 4:41 in the afternoon. I may not have the numbers precisely correct, but you get the idea. The hours were odd. Very odd. And they were strict. You couldn’t show up at, say, 4:42 P.M. and expect to gain admittance let alone a warm cola.

That I never asked the old lady to explain her strange hours or her singular choice of merchandise was due primarily to my reluctance to dispel the mystery. Einstein equated the mysterious with the beautiful, and while the nameless and dingy little Pepsi outlet did not exactly embody an exquisite equation addressing relativity or the secret origins of the universe, it did direct one’s attention to both the mysterious, ambiguous nature of “time” and our heavy-handed and somewhat arbitrary efforts to force logical order upon it. If the shop’s contents were monotonous, were static, its uneven, seemingly illogical hours of accessibility (which were subject to change without notice) had a way of mocking our notions of both harmony and permanence. The store seemed simultaneously fixed and boundless: it silently accentuated the conflict between measured time and the unaccountable infinite.

Okay, okay. Admittedly, I’d been reading the Surrealists that year and also had recently fallen rather madly in love with the avant-gardists of la belle époque, so it’s probably not wholly exceptional that I would take satisfaction in the manner in which the dusty little Pepsi store seemed to quietly push back the frontiers of logical reality — which may explain why, whenever I passed the place on foot or in a vehicle, the words that would come unbidden to mind were those of the poets laureate of the subconscious, the radical bards of the imaginative absolute. And why, for years thereafter, when friends asked why I always ordered a Pepsi instead of a Coke, I tended to smile nostalgically and quote André Breton: “I prefer red like the egg when it is green.”