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

Her dorm imposed a strict 10 P.M. curfew on its residents. It was boosted to eleven on Fridays and Saturdays but that extra hour was irrelevant since I worked until midnight except on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and Lynda had a studio class until 9 P.M. on Tuesdays. Essentially, we had a Wednesday kind of love. Sure, we could see one another on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but these were not exactly hours suited to romance; and it was as much the result of our conflicting schedules as the moral temper of the 1950s that physically our relationship hadn’t progressed beyond heavy petting in the front seat of my recently purchased Plymouth Valiant.

Lynda’s parents had thought I was cool — until they learned we were serious about one another, at which point, not fancying a goy in their woodpile, they pressured her to start seeing nice Jewish boys. She eventually settled on one, and though she contended that he was but a beard, a decoy, a front, the guy — having a more conventional schedule than my own — was soon seeing more of her than I was.

Somehow Lynda had injured her knee, and during the period between the end of spring semester and the beginning of summer school, when RPI was closed for two weeks, she entered the Medical College of Virginia to have the leg surgically repaired. In those days, hospitals maintained very strict visiting hours, and since her family and/or her substitute boyfriend were always in her room during the allotted time for visitation, it sorely tested my ingenuity to find a way to see her there. As fortune would have it, however, a friend of B.K.’s was an intern at MCV, and we convinced him to loan me his white coat and stethoscope for a few hours.

Late that evening I drove to MCV, ducked into a lobby restroom, removed the coat from my shopping bag and put it on. It proved about two sizes too large, but c’est la vie: the mission was a go. I hung the stethoscope around my neck and walked nonchalantly to the elevator. Several people were in the elevator but, luckily, they appeared to be mere staffers: maintenance men, dietitians, lab technicians, and the like. Nevertheless, I averted my eyes, staring at the floor as if contemplating an emergency colonoscopy I’d been summoned to perform.

I got off — alone — on the fourth floor and set out at a brisk pace for Lynda’s private room, where we might anticipate some hours of quality time together in an intimate setting. And, hey, the fact that I was quite literally “playing doctor” served to invoke enough intriguing possibilities ( Grey’s Anatomy meets the Kama Sutra ) to propel me ever faster down that long, empty corridor.

Just before I reached Lynda’s door, alas, a nurse came around the corner: a uniformed, middle-aged, stern-faced nurse. Her comfortable white shoes practically screeched to a halt. Why was she blocking my passage? Why was she staring me up and down? Maybe it was the baggy coat, so ill-fitting it suggested a horse blanket draped over a poodle. Or maybe it was the fact that at twenty-eight going on twenty-nine, I still looked about nineteen.

In any case, I concluded that an imminent discussion of my medical credentials was likely not in my best interest. The entrance to a stairwell happened to be but a few yards to my left, and propelled now by panic, I dashed for it and ran down three flights, removing my coat as I fled, although the stethoscope was still swinging wildly from my neck like a mutant Nagasaki whip snake when I barged panting into the lobby. Miraculously, I managed to get out of the hospital before an alarm could sound.

I relate this story not to embarrass Lynda Pleet or whatever nice (and lucky) Jewish boy she may have wed in my stead, but rather to convey the state of my frustration — the depth, breadth, and length of it — on that fateful day when I ran into Susan Bush at the financial district watering hole. The fact that I answered in the affirmative when a virtual stranger, a woman to whom I’d never been introduced, proposed marriage to me is both an indication of the size of that frustration and an illustration in action of two basic philosophical principles that came to guide my life.

(1) When a situation has become too frustrating, a quandary too persistently insolvable; when dealing with the issue is generating chronic discontent, infringing on freedom, and inhibiting growth, it may be time to quit beating one’s head against the wall, reach for a big fat stick of metaphoric dynamite, light the fuse, and blast the whole unhappy business nine miles past oblivion.

(2) After making an extreme effort, after pulling out all the stops, one is still unable to score Tibetan peach pie, take it as a signal to relax, grin, pick up a fork, and go for a slice of the apple.

Anyway, when the smoke cleared, when the ash settled, when the pie plate was washed and put away, Lynda seemed as relieved as I that our personal production of Romeo and Juliet had closed its run, though she might have preferred a more conventional ending (minus, of course, the double suicide).

Returning to the matter of racism, I should confess that I have had little or no interest in race per se. My activities on behalf of civil rights were motivated less by a blanket admiration for darkly pigmented peoples than by an innate hatred of injustice. Whenever groups or individuals are subjected to hurtful unfairness, my stomach tends to roil and my blood to boil in reaction. Suffice to say there was a considerable amount of roiling and boiling going on in my corporeal being as I interacted with the South in general and Virginia in particular, 1957–1962, but it was a goofy integrationist accident rather than an overt act of protest that set into motion the events that made inevitable my departure from Richmond as the cannon boom of Civil War enactments echoed all around me.

In most respects, the Times-Dispatch was an excellent newspaper, which is to say its writing and editing adhered to the highest journalistic standards, and this despite the fact that the large dictionary that sat atop a pedestal in the center of the newsroom, serving reporters and copy editors alike, was so out-of-date it defined uranium as “a worthless mineral.” Editorially, the T-D was likewise antiquated in the sense that it reflected the long-standing temperament and ideology of its statewide readership, an audience so conservative it considered Unitarians a satanic cult and the consumption of Russian dressing an act of treason. On its editorial page the T-D was an outspoken advocate of “separate but equal” rights, a gloss for “let the black bastards get their own damn buses”; while in its news columns no African American was ever mentioned by name unless he or she had committed an offense, and even then, no matter how sensational or newsworthy the crime, photographs of the colored perpetrator never seemed to make it into the paper.

On the T-D ’s copy desk where I worked, my liberal sentiments were well known, earning me the cute nickname of “Nigger Lover.” This epithet, however, was never vitriolic or hurled in disgust or anger. My coworkers, a sharp-witted, sharp-tongued, crusty crew of grammar guards, were just genuinely puzzled as to how an educated, clean-cut, Southern white boy (whose exploits in the Fan amused and titillated them) could have formed such heretical, unnatural opinions, and they chided me for my misguided views in an easygoing, jocular manner.

Their pet name might have been spoken with a drop more venom had they known that on Tuesday nights in 1961 I attended biracial meetings in the Unitarian church on Grove Avenue, and occasionally joined the group when, at some physical risk, it ventured into King William County to teach clandestine classes to African-American pupils. Rather than obey a federal order to integrate, King William had shut down all of its public schools, black and white. White kids were being tutored in “private schools” that met in church basements (Praise blue-eyed Jesus!), so our group was striving to provide a similar educational service at a black church out in the tick-infested sticks between the hamster-size hamlets of King William and Aylett. The subject I volunteered to teach was geography, it having been of keen interest to me ever since I acquired that world atlas at age seven, but for which these black kids had no more regard than did their Caucasian counterparts, which was approximately the same regard in which they might hold a fat fly sunbathing on a horse turd.