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

All of this gave me an appetite for enchantment — and I haven’t even mentioned the pastor’s little daughters, with whom, at their invitation, I used to play “doctor.” In this game, participants took turns being patient and physician. Highly instructive, it was hands-on, anatomically correct, and nobody on either end of the examination table gave a rip about insurance. Harvard Medical School, eat your heart out!

Any consideration of Blowing Rock’s influence that fails to mention The Bark is incomplete. A roadhouse on the outskirts of town, The Bark took its name from the unmilled cedar shakes with which it was sided, and its interior was as notorious as its exterior was rustic. Behind that rough facade, customers drank beer and danced, activities that to any good Southern Baptist invoked the Devil himself.

My mother, a stalwart in the church (her father, like my father’s father, was a Baptist preacher), taught a Sunday school class for committed Christians in their late teens and early twenties. On Wednesday evenings, the class met at our house. The meetings were part religious, part social; and after prayers, as young Baptists nibbled cookies and sipped punch, gossip (evidently not a sin) would typically bloom. Invariably, someone would blurt out, if it’s possible to blurt in a hushed tone, “Mary Jones was seen leaving The Bark Friday night.” Or, “Saturday, Daddy saw John Doe’s pickup parked at The Bark, and it was there for hours and hours.”

These bits of intelligence were always greeted with audible gasps, followed by much wagging of chin and clucking of tongue. If The Bark was forbidden fruit, then the shock, the awe with which they spoke of it, applied a polish, a sheen to its peel that in my imagination (I was eight, nine at the time) glowed like a peach of solid gold. I grew as attracted to that roadhouse as to the jungles of Tarzan and Jane.

On our way to the Rock or one or another of our various woodland hideouts, my buddies and I frequently passed The Bark, and we tended to pause there for long minutes and stare at the place, as if it were an evil castle where a great treasure was stored. Once in a while we’d see gentlemen emerge (after, we knew, a bout of drinking and dancing inside); we’d see some tattooed fellow with a cigar in his teeth, and with what the Sunday school crowd called a “floozy” on his arm; watch the couple straddle a big Harley-Davidson and go roaring out of the red clay parking lot, enveloped in an oxygen of freedom about whose perils and rewards we could scarcely guess. At those moments, all I wanted was to quickly become old enough to drink beer, dance, get tattooed, smoke cigars, ride motorcycles, and have a floozy of my own on my arm.

Eventually I was to accomplish all of those things — and they proved in no way a disappointment. Who said The Bark was worse than its bite?

The Hannah brothers, Georgie and Jimmy, were Iraqi Jews, actually born in Baghdad. Their father was a rug merchant who sold fine Oriental carpets in Blowing Rock every summer, in Florida the rest of the year. The day each June when Georgie and Jimmy arrived back in town was for me an occasion more anticipated and more exciting than Christmas. They were my favorite playmates, for their imagination equaled my own. The Hannah brothers excelled at making wooden swords and ray guns, at piecing together the funky costumes (cowboys, Indians, pirates, spacemen, jungle lords, etc.) apparently necessary for acting out our bizarrely improvised versions of recent movie scenes — as well as at sneaking into matinees at the theater where we studied such scenes far more attentively than we’d ever studied arithmetic.

All summer long we strived to outdo one another with the creativity of our variations on cinematic or comic-book themes, performing in backyards, along mountain trails, on the broken porches of “haunted” houses (daring one another to go inside), around the perimeters of golf courses, and in the gardens of the Mayview Manor Hotel, where we’d sometimes catch glimpses of vacationing celebrities. (We saw Bob Hope there, Jimmy Stewart, and General Eisenhower, but, alas alas, never Johnny Weissmuller.)

When, after Labor Day, Georgie and Jimmy were sadly returned to Sarasota, the limitless galaxy of make-believe all too quickly gave way to the mundane world of school. I still had my reading and writing, however. I also had Johnny Holshauser, a year-round boy, my next best friend, and — oh, the shame! — my partner in actual crime.

One half-warm spring afternoon, Johnny and I were moping about, bored with the accumulated inertia at church and school, despondent over our chronic lack of funds. We had not a dime for a comic book, not a nickel for a candy bar, not even a penny for a gumball — and at age seven going on eight, attempting to barter our pants for financial gain would have been neither cute nor profitable. All at once, or maybe it unfolded gradually, we had an idea, a strategy, a ploy. It was simple. We’d rob a bank.

Of course, it was hardly an original solution. All through the Great Depression, proactive young fellows with neither money nor prospects had discovered that robbing banks could impact their cash flow in a positive if not always sustainable manner.

Johnny and I each owned a cap pistol that fairly closely resembled an actual handgun. Thus armed, we marched into the Northwestern State Bank on Blowing Rock’s main drag, pointed our pieces at an astonished teller, and demanded “a lot of money.” Mind you, this was no prank. We were completely serious. Everything went very quiet for a moment or two. Then the shooting began.

At least, we thought it was shooting. In those days there was an item of fireworks called “torpedoes,” a misleading name since in size and shape they resembled those gumballs we couldn’t afford. They were like dry, gray jawbreakers that when hurled against a hard surface, exploded with a loud report. Obviously unknown to us, the bank had a supply of said torpedoes, and one or more of the employees surreptitiously began throwing them at the marble walls and floor. Johnny bolted for the door, me right behind him, both convinced that bullets were whizzing past our heads.

We hightailed it through town, took a back road up a steepish hill, and barreled into the woods, not stopping until we reached a primitive lean-to, one of our aforementioned hideouts. There, breathless, we collapsed on the pine needles. And waited. Waited. Listening for sirens or other signals that the police or a posse of vigilantes was on our trail.

Hours passed. Darkness fell. A heavy chill, like an ice-hoofed horse, clattered in and out among the rhododendron and huckleberry bushes. Owls hooted. We heard growling that might have been a bear. A mountain lion. Or the bogeyman. Or our empty stomachs. Finally, unable to stand it another minute, we crept hungrily, nervously, sheepishly, back to our respective homes.

News of the aborted holdup had spread quickly through town that afternoon. Most citizens got a good laugh out of it, though my parents could not be counted among the amused. Following a brief lecture, surely to be continued, I was given toast and milk — thanks, perhaps, to the Geneva Conventions — and ordered to bed.

In my room, I lay awake, troubled by guilt, scorched by embarrassment, worried about inevitable repercussions. Yet, with a secret smile, I couldn’t help thinking, If Georgie and Jimmy Hannah had been with us, we could have pulled it off.

Having in my seventies developed a mild and belated interest in genealogy, I hired a professional to look into my ancestry. To my delight she discovered a few odd nuts (if their names be any clue) dangling from the old family tree. For example, there was Smallwood Marlow, Marvel Greene, Mountain Issac Greene, Nimrod Triplett, Commodore (his name not his rank) Robbins, and most intriguing of all, a woman listed as Elizabeth Gotobed. Most of these splendidly christened individuals resided in North Carolina, though none in Blowing Rock per se.