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

Thus spake the Redheaded Wino.

I did keep walking. What else could I do? Just before I reached the Times, I pivoted to see if he might be following. And he wasn’t there! Probably he’d only turned the corner, but I had the impression that he’d vanished in a puff of smoke. In fact, to this day I sometimes wonder if he’d ever been there at all, if he hadn’t been an apparition, a manifestation of Mescalito projected by some cactus-juiced, acid-etched circuit in the recesses of my cerebellum; the one area, perhaps, where neither conscience nor delusion has a place to hide.

In any event, I went home later that afternoon and brooded. All weekend, I brooded and stewed, tossing in a clothes dryer of self-examination. The Seattle Times was no sweatshop, no earth-raping multinational combine, no soulless bank. It was in truth a fine place to work, a public service staffed with intelligent reporters, witty columnists, and responsible editors who went out of their way to be fair to readers and subordinates alike. Still… still, that carrot-topped wraith, real or imagined, had hit me where it hurt; had with one sulfuric laugh shattered my mask and spoiled my act as a regular guy.

Monday morning I called in well. Three weeks later, I moved to New York. I should have gone to San Francisco.

I should have gone to San Francisco. If my objective had been to connect with like-minded people, to fraternize, perhaps on a regular basis, with other travelers home from the rabbit hole, moving to New York was a mistake.

Granted, there were individuals in Manhattan who’d taken or were taking psychedelics, but few in number, they flew well below the radar; and even though I lived just up the street from the iconic Peace Eye Bookstore, where I mingled with luminaries of the Beat Generation and befriended Allen Ginsberg, I never established contact with my presumed kin; whereas in San Francisco in late 1964 there was an infestation of white rabbits and they were multiplying like… well, like rabbits. A radical new music (a mixture of surfer rock, Southern blues, Berlin music hall, and Indian raga), with far-out lyrics was spilling into the streets around Haight and Ashbury, the city’s younger citizens were dressing as if every day was Mardi Gras, and Chronicle columnist Herb Caen would soon be coining the term “hippie.” An incandescent acid rain was sprinkling San Francisco, but Tommy Rotten, oblivious, had fled the thin gray rains of Seattle for the dirty snows of New York. He hadn’t heard the California weather report.

As I look back now, I see that my ignorance had been a stroke of luck. In San Francisco I could have been sucked into the developing psychedelic scene (a scene, man); could have been caught up in the looming politics of ecstasy, another sixties comet chasing its own bright tail. Aside from my conviction that for maximum benefit, the forbidden fruits of LSD are best savored in solitude, the psychedelic experience, as I said, was emphatically nonverbal, and after more than a year during which I was as suspicious of verbiage as of a bigmouthed car salesman with dyed blond hair and three ex-wives, I was, secluded in my New York tenement, beginning slowly to fall in love again with wood pulp and ink. I don’t think they were reading all that much in the Haight.

At age five I’d hitched my little red wagon to the Language Wheel, that disk of verbiage that came rolling out of the grunting and growling mud of prehistory, accumulating variations and refinements beyond number as it rolled headlong into literacy, and — when greased with imagination — into poetry, into theater, ballads, sutras, and rants. LSD’s preliterate/postliterate juggernaut had run me off the road. I’d believed myself stranded there, but now Hermann Hesse had driven up in a vintage Mercedes tow truck, its radio blaring Mozart, and winched my wagon out of the ditch, demonstrating in Steppenwolf that modern narrative fiction indeed could transcend bourgeois preoccupations, and with both an enlightening and an entertaining panache, as playful as it is deadly serious, bind spirit to matter and insinuate for readers those hidden worlds within our world. Das ist gut.

I checked my load. The cargo appeared intact. Transformation, liberation, and celebration; exotica and erotica; novelty, beauty, mischief, and mirth: the goods I’d been hauling around for damn near three decades, all present and accounted for. If anything, psychedelics had cleaned them up a bit, given them a shine. This was encouraging, but having yet to find a literary voice of my own, and not wishing to imitate Hesse (or, for that matter, anybody else), I was to bide my time for nearly three more years before I trusted the muse enough to start my first novel.

In the meantime, however, like a lapsed believer returning to the fold, I commenced to reaffirm my devotion to language, that magical honeycomb of words into which human reality is forever dissolving and from which it continually reemerges, having invented itself anew. The adjective in the lotus. The jewel in the inkwell. A blue dolphin leaping from a sink of dirty dishes.

Whether the Protestant ethic, so called, is a self-imposed affliction, a hobble, a governor, a kind of chastity belt that limits full enjoyment of life; or, instead, is an indicator of trustworthy character, fidelity, and good moral health, well, that may be a subject for debate. In any case, I myself seem to have been tainted — or blessed — with that set of values at an early age and to this day have failed to completely outgrow that aspect of it that applies to conscientious work habits. Thus, though I’d landed in New York with enough savings to keep me gainfully unemployed for approximately a year (considering that my rent on East Tenth Street was $51.50 a month and I knew how to eat for a buck or two a day), my ethic demanded that I put my nose to the grindstone, although, naturally, not just any grindstone would do.

The task I set for myself to justify a Manhattan sabbatical was to write a book, specifically (having not yet found my fiction voice) a dual biography of two power-packed maverick painters, Jackson Pollock and Chaim Soutine, comparing their lives and their art. Although no critic had ever made the comparison (and still have not as far as I know), the connection struck me as obvious. Soutine (1893–1943) was a scrawny slum-dog savant from Eastern Europe, Pollock (1912–1956) a brawny cowboyish genius out of Cody, Wyoming, and the two never met; Soutine’s paintings featured representational content, Pollock’s major works were wholly abstract; yet there were striking similarities in their approach to life and art, and I maintain that Soutine, whose paintings we know Pollock saw at a New York gallery in 1936 and ’37, was the American dripmaster’s single biggest influence.

Soutine was arguably the first representational painter to completely reject Renaissance perspective in favor of an overall emphasis that, devoid of a recessed background or central focal point, made each and every square inch of the picture plane as important as any other. Emphasis was uniformly insistent from framing edge to framing edge, as it was soon to be in a Pollock, though Soutine’s dense, dark passages of pigment lurched at the viewer in a kind of visual attack, whereas Pollock’s roiling constellations swirled all about an onlooker like debris in a polychrome tornado.

Almost supernaturally connected to their primal unconscious, operating at a pitch next to madness, both men lived turbulent, Dionysian lives rife with instances of bizarre behavior; tortured by rejection, disoriented by success. But this is neither the time nor place to get into all that. Here it’s sufficient to say I spent my days in New York researching Pollock and Soutine, including numerous interviews with people who’d known them well, and while I never got around to writing that book (the Dionysus in my own unconscious began to demand my attention elsewhere), the experience was worth more than a dozen seminars at any graduate school in the land.