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

My immediate reaction I don’t recall, but on many occasions in years to come I would silently thank him for the perspective: a lesson in attitude made all the more indelible by the kiss.

Such was his calling, I suppose. A hot-wired sutra slinger, a Vendantic versifier, a Wurlitzer of howling meat drunk on holy quarters, Ginsberg — invoking the eternal within the ephemeral; wholeheartedly celebrating paradox and confusion as the fundamental fluids in which the human condition hangs suspended (thereby refining our base dissatisfactions into the more luminous chemistry of acceptance, compassion, goofiness, and grief) — Ginsberg had the capacity to cast a net of enchantment around nearly everything in life, from a busted dusty sunflower to a potential bust by the morality police.

Not long ago, the United States Postal Service issued a series of stamps honoring the greatest modern American poets. The face of Allen Ginsberg was not among them. It figures, doesn’t it?

Eileen and I fled New York in the middle of the night. Our hasty exit, however, was neither as dramatic nor as nefarious as it sounds.

Eileen Halpin, short, brown of hair and feisty of spirit, with soulful eyes and a mouth so sensual it could prompt the pope to dive headfirst off his balcony, was a student in the art department at the University of Washington. We had met in August of ’64 just weeks prior to my departure for New York, when I was still under the sway of the Redheaded Wino, and spent three or four lovely sleepless nights together before I left Seattle. I never expected to see her again, but once I’d settled in what New Yorkers were just beginning to call the “East Village” (having dropped off Susan and Kendall in Richmond and picked up B.K., who found lodging in the tenement house next to mine), Eileen and I commenced a correspondence perfumed with such mutual attraction that not much more than a month had passed before I was meeting her train at Grand Central station.

Ever spunky and independent, Eileen wasted little time in landing a job waitressing at Café Renzi, a popular Greenwich Village coffeehouse, just down the street from where a kid named Bob Dylan was starting to flex his adenoids. Although her earnings were small, they augmented my savings, subsidizing to some extent my research. By late June ’65, however, those savings were so depleted that coffeehouse tips were insufficient to prop them up. And then there was the matter of Ken Kesey and the weather…

June was pistol-whipping Manhattan with a dead flounder; the air thick with heat, humidity, hydrocarbons, and the near-evil effluvia of rotting garbage. Our apartment lacked air-conditioning or even a fan, so to keep cool in the evenings we’d crawl through a window and sit on the fire escape. When Eileen was at work, I’d read out there, straining my eyes in the stray glare of a streetlight. As chance would have it, the novel I’d begun reading that summer was Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, which, set in the Pacific Northwest, was sodden with images of green moss, green ferns, green cedars and firs, cool green drizzle, and cold green rivers: such a saturation of greenness that it would have sent an ol’ desert rat like Gaddafi into shock, causing him to chant “beige, beige, beige, beige, beige…”

One midnight (I’d been splashing in Kesey puddles and, not coincidentally, it was only days before July’s rent was due), Eileen returned from Café Renzi to find me packing my bags. “Get your darling stuff together, little darlin’,” I said. “We’re betraying New York ’ere the cock crows thrice.” Our landlord’s real estate office was on the ground floor of our building and it would be up and running by nine. By the time it opened, Eileen and I and our belongings were crammed in the trusty old Valiant, putting across western New Jersey. As we’d crossed the Hudson, I’d waved au revoir and “later, man,” to the ghosts of Soutine and Pollock, thanking them for their nine months of service to my Protestant ethic.

There’d been another motivation for escaping New York. The area around Tompkins Square Park where we lived had for many decades been a neighborhood of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants. By the early sixties, however, it had become increasingly populated by Puerto Ricans (soon they’d be displaced by hippies, but that was yet to come), and at night, young Hispanic gangs dominated street life. Incidents of violence were fairly rare, though the nocturnal prevalence of knots of young Latin males on corners or on tenement steps created a certain sense of wariness and unease. Walking home late from Stanley’s Bar on Avenue B, I was always alert for trouble, a tiny bit on edge even when accompanied by a muscleman like B.K.

The two rival gangs in our hood were “the 12th St. Boys” and “the Dutchmen.” Why a group of tough teens from Puerto Rico would choose to identify with cheese-making, ice-skating, Northern European windmill keepers, I was never to fathom, but I did learn other things about these Latino Dutchmen and I learned them firsthand.

The competing gangs staked out and defined their territory by chalking their names on every available wall. One afternoon as I was walking up East Tenth Street, I witnessed just such a verbal flag-planting by a party of so-called Dutchmen, observing that they, as usual, were misspelling their own sacred name. The leader of this contingent had just written D*U*C*H*M*E*N” on a brick facade and stepped back to admire his handiwork when — motivated by an uncontrollable editorial impulse, a force that had operated in my life since early childhood — I walked over, demanded the chalk (the gangster was too stunned or, smelling blood, too amused to refuse), seized it and inserted a big chalky capital T . “There,” I said, “that’s how you spell it. D*U* T *C*H*M*E*N.”

It was only then, as I handed back the chalk, that the utter recklessness of my impromptu pedagogery hit me. Good God, Tom, what have you done! As I prepared to sprint for my life, pursued by a pack of urban wolves, the boys nodded. They smiled. They muttered their thanks in Spanish and in English. And I walked away unscathed, resisting any impulse to accelerate my pace or glance back over my shoulder. It had turned out well, after all. It had. But it wasn’t over.

These gangbangers (ages fourteen through eighteen) had a lot of time on their hands. As they loitered in doorways or in nooks of Tompkins Square, they talked. They conversed for hours, day and night, and as I was to learn, they argued; argued about an amazingly wide range of subjects: not merely sports and pop culture, but current events, history, geography, and nature (including human and animal sexuality). You can see where this is going. I, the gringo who had the education to correct their spelling and the cojones to scribble their name (illegally, of course) on a wall, became their trusted arbiter. From that day on, I scarcely could pass a group of Dutchmen without being called upon to settle some debate.

It was kind of flattering, kind of cool, being an oracle to a gang in the mean streets of New York, but I sensed that my position as a one-man ambulatory search engine could only lead to no good. What if an argument grew overly heated and I sided with some younger, weaker member or members rather than the leader of the pack? What if they were to discover that unwittingly or to hide my ignorance I’d given them wrong information? What if the 12th St. Boys had their own mentor, a retired professor or something, and he were to challenge me to a dramatic High Noon erudition face-off? This was before the National Rifle Association helped assure that any hotheaded punk in America could access a handgun, but it was rumored that each and every one of these gangsters carried switchblades. I couldn’t very well avoid the Dutchmen or resign my position. The situation wasn’t exactly urgent, but it did serve as an added incentive to, as Mark Twain, put it, “light out for the territories.”