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

People rarely asked me twice.

If charm were a bathtub, Richmond could have floated a hundred rubber duckies and still had room for half the Royal Navy. With its antebellum architecture, its broad boulevards (a noted European critic once wrote that Richmond’s Monument Avenue was “the most beautiful street in America”); with its heroic statues, its blossoms, its birds, its boughs, its high-tea manners and grits-and-sorghum hospitality; with its cautiously frisky, intoxicating springs; and its horsey, gilt-edged falls, Richmond was a study in slowly barbecued, lightly salted grace. Ah, but a big front has a big back, and Richmond had a dark side wider and muddier than the James River that cuts through the city with a bourbon track.

Never mind the annual Tobacco Festival that marshaled lavish floats, dozens of marching bands, and a court of competing beauty queens to celebrate — yes, celebrate! — a smelly, highly addictive substance responsible for millions of deaths the world over. And never mind the Civil War Centennial, a fête that was to last precisely as long as the horrific conflict itself, and that would make no effort to conceal — nor spare any expense to demonstrate — Richmond’s pride in having served as the capital of the Confederacy during the most shameful period of America’s history. I’m inclined to set aside those commemorations, and the bloody war and the killer weed that inspired them, to focus on a livelier, more persistent skeleton clacking its bones in Richmond’s charming closet.

There are historians who will point out that some good did result from the Civil War (abolition of slavery for example); and apologists who laud with some justification tobacco’s prominent role in the economic rise of our young nation. There can be no plea, however, on behalf of racism, no defense that isn’t as evil as the attitudes and policies of racism itself. And here let me emphasize that I bring up the subject not to jab a stick in Richmond’s once-blind eye, an orb that while still not 20/20 perhaps, can nowadays distinguish a fellow human being from an inferior subspecies and behave accordingly; but, rather, because Richmond’s racism colors (if that’s not a poor choice of verbs) the two wiggy but consequential stories I wish next to tell.

On my writing room wall there hangs a poster so faded and worn it might have once hung in the men’s toilet at the Crazy Horse Saloon. It depicts a caricature of a horned beast and reads like this: The Rhinoceros Coffee House Presents Tom Robbins / Poetry Reading & Lectures on Alley Culture / Set to Jazz (Paul Miller’s Primitive Four) / 18 Jan. 1961 / 9:00 / 538 Harrison. I’m unsure why that old poster has remained in my possession all these years when I’ve lost so many other doubtlessly more valuable souvenirs and mementos along the way. Yet here it hangs, and from it hangs a tale.

The Rhinoceros was opened a half block from the Village Inn by a couple of acquaintances cashing in — though God knows it made precious little money — on the beatnik coffeehouse fad that had begun a few years earlier in San Francisco. Well, you couldn’t have a real beatnik coffeehouse without beatnik poets, and since Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were permanently occupied elsewhere, I volunteered to substitute, hastily composing a sheaf of poetic rants specifically for the occasion. (As that editor at the New Yorker would attest, I would have had to be as mad as an outhouse rat to fancy myself a true poet.)

While in the course of my reading I confessed my love of the city, I also employed twenty-three shades of satire and twenty-four of hyperbole to box Richmond’s pretty pink ears, box it for its Tobacco Festival, its upcoming Civil War Centennial, its affected anglophilia, and, most resoundingly, its racism. Amateurish though my poems surely were, my metaphors were inventive, my imagery outlandish and funny, and those in the small audience seemed receptive enough — with one notable exception. In the middle of one of my rampaging verses, a young woman got up and stalked out, not unobtrusively, mind you: she was in a huff and made certain everyone knew it.

I recognized the woman, I’d seen her in the Village a time or two, although we’d never met. She was difficult to ignore, frankly, being tall, blond, shapely, and as creamy as a hot vanilla sundae. Her name was Susan Bush (no relation to that nefarious gang down in Texas), and she resided not in the helter-skelter Fan but the formal West End, the daughter of one of those aristocratic old Virginia families that had lost its wealth but not its conceits. She worked for a brokerage firm and her friends (and presumably her lovers) were stockbrokers, bankers, and lawyers; all very Episcopalian and unwilling to let you forget that their colonial ancestors had settled Jamestown and established grand plantations while yours were digging potatoes behind some thatched-roof hovel in the old country.

When she dropped into the Village, regulars believed Susan to be slumming, and to a certain extent that was true, but nobody much minded because she was affable, respectful, could hold her alcohol, and, as no male with sufficient testosterone to sprout a single whisker would have failed to notice, beautiful.

Nine months passed before I saw Susan again. It was an unseasonably warm day in October and I’d gone down to the financial district to argue with my landlords. In Richmond, it was rare to rent an apartment from an on-site owner, a tenant almost always had to go through a rental agency, usually part of a large real estate firm and not given to taking the tenant’s side in any dispute. Whatever our disagreement, my meeting with the landlords had not gone in my favor that day. Overheated by both the dialogue and the weather, I ducked into the closest grill and ordered a beer. I was standing at the bar trying to lower my temperature with a frosty Pabst Blue Ribbon when who should walk in, having just gotten off work nearby, but Susan Bush. I don’t know if she recognized me at first, but within seconds, perhaps by chance, she was right next to me at the bar. We faced one another. She graced me with about 70 percent of a smile. And I proceeded to let her have it.

I mean I really lit into her. I told her that her dramatic exit from the Rhinoceros was not merely rude, not simply crass, but indicative of a level of insensitivity exceeded only by her shallowness and ignorance. I informed her that had she the intellectual wherewithal to distinguish shit from Shinola, she would have realized that I only criticized Richmond because the place was important to me. “Why would I have gone to all that trouble,” I asked, “to illuminate Richmond’s faults if I didn’t love the city and desperately yearn for it to conduct itself in a more enlightened manner?”

Finally, having exhausted my allotment of bile, I stepped back and took a long slow draft of beer. Susan just stood there. She stood there silently, looking at me with considerable focus and intensity, staring as if she were trying to memorize and catalog every pore in the face of someone who had just called her a clueless philistine. Then, after at least a full minute, she revived her 70 percent yet somehow now more creamy smile, and asked softly, intently, without a squib of sarcasm or trace of tease, “Will you marry me?”

I may have been stunned, but I wasn’t totally speechless. “Yes,” I said.

And the next day, we drove to North Carolina, where there was no waiting period for a license, and were married there.

Lest the reader judge me madder than that outhouse rat’s hallucinating aunt (the old garbage-dump rat who thinks she’s Minnie Mouse), let me hasten to supply a bit of backstory.

For nearly a year, I’d been dating an RPI art student named Lynda Pleet. Lynda was smart, confident, a talented painter, and movie-star gorgeous. She also resided in a women’s dormitory and she was Jewish, two conditions that conspired to keep us apart.