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

Let’s try not to picture the act of conception, but the Lobster Boy fathered four children, two of whom, a boy and a girl, inherited his deformity, becoming part of a living sideshow tableau, the Lobster Family. Another son, adopted and anatomically normal, is, to the best of my knowledge, still performing on midways, ballyhooed as the Human Blockhead. In his act, he hammers nails and shoves ice picks up his nose. I guess showbiz just gets in one’s blood. In any case, the people who knew the Lobster Boy regarded him a cruelly mean alcoholic and few mourned his violent demise. Still, he was a major midway attraction for many years and I hope they at least thought to embalm him in melted butter.

Considering Gibsonton’s oddities and wonders, it shouldn’t be surprising that my wife Alexa and I were intrigued when on one of our visits there we came upon a crude handmade sign announcing a yard sale. We set out immediately for the address, and while we were to find no quaint or colorful carnival memorabilia, the yard sale did provide, in its quirky brand-name exclusivity, an experience reminiscent of Richmond’s Pepsi-only store.

The “yard” proved to be a vacant lot adjoining a gas station. Upon it were three long banquet tables. The tables were separated by enough distance that there appeared to be no connection between them or to the lone individuals who stood behind each table. Actually, only two were standing, the third person was not built to be comfortable for long in an upright position. From a sturdy chair, she confided to Alexa that she had been billed as “the Ton of Fun” in a carnival sideshow before an illness caused her to lose more than two hundred pounds. She was still about as big around as the average kitchen refrigerator, though no longer so fat that rubes would fork over cash money to ogle her blubber. The woman’s table was piled high with Butterfinger candy bars. Only Butterfingers. Hundreds of them. Hundreds! In bulk. For sale. We had to wonder if she was liquidating her personal stash.

Another table was equally loaded down with new blue cotton work shirts, all from the same manufacturer, Girbaud. On the third table there was nothing but stacks and stacks and stacks of Metamucil.

And there, folks, you have your yard sale: a specific brand of work shirt, candy bar, and popular over-the-counter laxative, each in massive quantities. Readers of my novels can be forgiven if they think I’m making this up, but Alexa is my witness, and if I exaggerate may the Human Blockhead pound frozen Butterfingers up my nostrils.

The very first time I attended a concert by a symphony orchestra, it was in order to review the performance for a leading metropolitan daily newspaper. The first time I ever went to the opera, it was for the very same reason. And in both instances, my critiques were published, presented to the public as if they were the reasoned and insightful opinions of an experienced musical authority. I suppose I owe it to readers, especially any who unlike me are classically cultured enough to tell spezzati from spaghetti, to explain how this charade came about.

When you blow up a major life situation, as I did on two fronts before leaving Richmond, the explosion can leave a hole in your psyche. Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and over time the crater is almost certain to fill in with new wisdom — or fresh folly. Sometimes it can be a challenge to tell the difference. For example, my metamorphosis into a critic, indeed my first thirty months in Seattle overall, was a mingle of transformative revelations and screwball circumstances.

Susan, little Kendall, and I had arrived in Seattle on a Friday afternoon following a cross-country drive that lacked only a team of sled dogs to successfully re-create a scene from Nanook of the North . From western Pennsylvania to eastern Montana, Old Man Winter had a stick up his butt, punishing animal, vegetable, and mineral alike (cars count as “mineral,” don’t they?) with lashing winds, deadly low temperatures, and a great suffocation of snow. Unaccustomed to driving on ice, I braked abruptly at the lone stoplight in Perham, Minnesota, and went skidding into the rear of a farm truck. The truck shrugged it off and the damage to our Valiant was largely cosmetic, but the collision caused an air vent under our dashboard to stick open, permitting swirling snow, mile after mile, to blow up my pant leg. By the time we’d traversed North Dakota, the family jewels were so frozen they wouldn’t have looked out of place on Michelangelo’s marble statue of David.

Eastern Washington, while considerably more benign, was nevertheless chilly, its brown fields lightly dusted with snow, but once we crossed the Cascades and began our descent into Seattle, there’d been a dramatic shift, meteorologically and chromatically. It was like being gulped down the open throat of an emerald. A famous Italian journalist once began her interview with Muammar Gaddafi by asking the Libyan dictator if he had a favorite color, to which Gaddafi replied, “Green, green, green, green, green, green, green…” on and on, over and over, for nearly five minutes, she said, before she could get him to stop. The interviewer thought he was crazed but I think he was channeling Seattle.

Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist. These days, Seattle is not radically dissimilar to other large cities in California or back east, but in 1962 it was a magical metropolis, wrested from moss, mildew, and mud; animated more by chain saw and chi than by commerce and chutzpah; and although I would miss Richmond and miss aspects of it still, I was thrilled to the bone to have landed into this clam-chawed outpost where one might mix metaphors with impunity, bathed in oyster light beneath skies that resembled bad banana baby food. That darkening afternoon, watching Seattle’s hills begin to sparkle as if mounds of damp silage were being set upon by a trillion amorous fireflies blinking Morse code haikus that no Virginia cockroach could appreciate or understand, my heart informed my head that I had found my new home.

We’d traveled that northern route across the U.S., so fraught with wintry perils, neither out of innocence nor a craving for adventure but because I simply couldn’t afford the extra fuel required to take a warmer, drier southern route. As it was, I’d arrived in Seattle with only a hundred dollars in my wallet, three bodies to feed and house, and no clear prospect for fattening the kitty.

Barely had we entered the city, however, when, driving along Boren Avenue, precise destination unknown, I glanced up a side street and spotted a “For Rent” sign on a 1930s-era brick building. I made a quick right turn, parked on the northwest corner of James and Minor, went inside and handed over eighty-five dollars for the first month’s rent of a clean, roomy apartment. The landlord was Japanese American, which I took as a favorable — even exciting — omen, since, if truth be told, its connections and relative proximity to Japan were the reasons I’d sought out Seattle in the first place.

With the remaining fifteen bucks, I walked to a little corner market and stocked up on cheap, filling foods such as rice, beans, cereal, and a few decidedly non-Zen items like Dinty Moore beef stew. For a celebration, I splurged (it cost a whole ninety-nine cents) on a six-pack of beer. For several minutes, I studied the labels on Olympia and Rainier, debating which local brand to test-drive. Eventually, influenced by its label alone, I selected Olympia. It was the wrong choice. Everything else, however — for days, weeks, and months — was to go so miraculously well that events seemed choreographed by the gods.