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

The more Charlie talked, the more convinced I became that he not only truly believed that philosophy, he, for one, was actually living it. There was a purity about him, a blaze in his eyes, that bordered on the charismatic. I also had the sense that hanging out with him would be dangerous: not because he might prove mean, violent, dishonest, or crazier than anybody else I knew, but because he seemed both completely uncompromised and completely uncompromising. As Henry Miller said of Rimbaud, he was “like a man who discovered electricity but knew absolutely nothing about insulation.”

At any rate, the dude said he wrote songs and wished to perform a selection of them on Notes From the Underground, with which he was somewhat, somehow (he was not a local resident) familiar. Ordinarily, I would have consented, for while my shows were fairly well organized, it would have violated their spirit, the spirit of the times, not to be open to — even eager for — change and surprise. The following morning, however, I was leaving on a monthlong jaunt to Arizona and for that show only I’d actually scripted a program with a beginning, middle, and end. Any interruption of the Aristotelian flow would have sabotaged it, completely wrecking the desired cumulative affect. So, I turned Charlie down and sent him on his way.

Visibly disappointed but polite enough about it, he shuffled off into the summer Sunday night and vanished there. Two years would pass before I recognized his picture in the newspaper and realized that for better or for worse, I’d rejected — and turned down an opportunity to tape a live performance by — Charles Manson.

Throughout all those diversions — the art columns, the happenings, the radio show, rock concerts, protest marches, pot parties, etc. - the old literary pulse continued to throb in my blood. On occasion it would reverberate like a musical saw, but most of the time it beat like tom-toms: distant, faint, mysterious, yet persistent, somehow urgent, prompting my left brain to murmur, “The natives are restless tonight.”

A novel had announced itself. It was coming to town. Posters were plastered on every wall in my cerebellum, a vacant lot in that vicinity had been reserved. The date of the first performance, however, was continually postponed. Obviously, annoyingly, there remained issues to be resolved.

I had my center pole, had had it for two years or more. The stolen corpse of Jesus and its reappearance in a funky roadside zoo: those elements could definitely support a literary big top. But a tentpole was not a tent and it certainly wasn’t the show itself. I needed wider context, a backdrop, a milieu; needed atmosphere, subplots, and a company of performers. Embedded in it as I was, it took time to recognize that the show I sought was unfolding all around me. Faulkner had his inbred Southern gothic freak show, Hemingway his European battlefields and cafés, Melville his New England with its tall ships: I had, it finally dawned on me, a cultural phenomenon such as the world had not quite seen before, has not seen since; a psychic upheaval, a paradigm shift, a widespread if ultimately unsustainable egalitarian leap in consciousness. And it was all very up close and personal.

Now, not to belabor the circus analogy, but I must mention that I’d also recently found a ringmaster, a music director, a designer to set the overall tone of the show; which is to say, I had at last found my voice. I discovered it very late one night in July 1967, while writing a review of a Doors concert for the Helix, Seattle’s underground newspaper. My review and the tone I found myself adopting in its composition were not derivative, not specifically influenced by Jim Morrison’s blood-dark, leather-winged poetics. Rather, it was that the concert had energized me in a peculiar and powerful way. It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions. When I read over the paragraphs I’d written that midnight, I detected an ease, a freedom of expression, a syntax simultaneously wild and precise, a rare blending of reckless abandon and tight control; and thought, Yeah, this is it. This is how I want to sound. I’d broken on through to the other side.

Even so, writing a novel set in the sixties presented a challenge on at least two fronts: one was immediate and obvious before I even began. The other — reactive and unforeseen — inexplicably persists to this day. Of that, more later.

Tom Wolfe, my old schoolmate, has lamented that there has yet to be written a definitive novel of the sixties. Wolfe, of course, is an outspoken advocate of the nineteenth-century approach to the novel, the reportorial approach that amounts to journalism with a thin fictive gloss. I’d instinctively realized, however, that the Dickensian method, while it has its virtues, was simply inappropriate to the material at hand. It could not possibly crack the nut of the period, penetrate its essence; or untangle the multicultural, multicolored web of myth that enwrapped its heart. The sixties, you see, were characterized not by manners but by fantasy.

Fantasy being inscrutable under the microscope of social realism, I (again, instinctively), knew I must compose Another Roadside Attraction (I’d recently decided on a title) in a fashion for which there was no satisfactory model. My intent therefore became not so much to describe the sixties as to re-create them on the page, to mirror in style as well as content their mood, their palette, their extremes, their vibrations, their profundity, their silliness and whimsy (for despite the prevailing political turmoil, it was a highly whimsical age). Professor Liam Purdon of Doane College, addressing me personally, has written, “You committed to becoming a novelist during turbulent times. When the blank page offered resistance to the vortex of your imaginative creation, you began, as Burroughs did later in his writing career, simply to alter the novel form itself.”

Traditionally, a novel moves from minor climax to minor climax to major climax along a gradually inclined plane. But while 95 percent of all novels are constructed this way, it was not a form that could possibly generate the plexus of effects, let alone evoke the gestalt, necessary to unveil the sixties and make them palpable, to coax them into giving up their secrets great and small. Eventually, it became clear to me that I must construct Another Roadside Attraction in short bursts, modeled perhaps on Zen koans, on Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes, and on the little flashes of illumination one experiences under the influence of certain sacraments. My book’s goal, then, was not so much to simulate reality as to become reality, a reality paradoxically steeped in fantasy.

Needless to say, such a novel — a novel constructed of zip and zap and zing and zonk, a novel that does its own stunts — seemed destined to test the mental agility of the critical establishment, but that was hardly my concern, particularly since I’d yet to put a word of it on paper. The tom-toms were nearer, louder now, however, the gong was interrupting my sleep; and the morning after I’d kissed off Charles Manson, as my new girlfriend and I motored down Highway 101 in a 1949 Dodge panel truck (hand-painted silver), the opening lines of Another Roadside Attraction were crawling along the screen behind my eyes.

Eileen had decamped a few weeks prior. We had an intense relationship, she and I, a union in which we seemed constantly competing to see who could most successfully blow the other’s mind. We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out- avant the other’s garde . It was exciting, stimulating, but also draining, especially when coupled as it was with mutual romantic jealousy, arguably the dumbest, most useless of human emotions. In the end, Eileen trumped me, captured the flag, by packing up and moving to San Francisco, the epicenter of the new American revolution. Touché!