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

On our first night in South Bend, we were kept awake beyond midnight by teenagers driving past the house, honking horns and yelling “Hippies! Hippies! Dirty hippies!” Terrie was quaking, but I calmed her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Not a problem. It’s the beginning of love.”

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before kids started dropping by two or three at a time, sheepishly curious; and ere a month passed before our living room was filled virtually every night with teenage boys digging our record collection, questioning us about current events (including the Vietnam War), sex (evasively), drugs (we never gave them any), and rock and roll (through my KRAB connections, I always had the latest albums). We might as well have been the local Boys and Girls Club. I considered requesting funding from United Way.

Terrie took a job waiting tables at a nearby seafood restaurant, from where she would fetch home leftovers off her customer’s plates. Indifferent to germs, we dined heartily and happily on slops de la mer. Is it any wonder that I’ve maintained a soft spot in my heart for waitresses? Many writers subsist on grants from foundations. Mine have been from the waitresses of American. The Daughters of the Daily Special.

As my contribution, I drove to Seattle and the P-I copy desk every Saturday morning, returning to South Bend late Sunday night, except during summer vacation periods or holiday weeks when I would sometimes work three or four days in a row. In the city I’d take a room at the Apex Hotel, located on a dull, pregentrified block of First Avenue. At three dollars a night, the Apex was kind of an upper-story flophouse, but operated by a Japanese couple who kept it orderly and clean. Still, it reeked of cigarette smoke, its mattresses felt like sacks of softballs, the bedsprings squeaked like thickets full of mating chipmunks, and the wallpaper would have given Oscar Wilde a heart attack.

In the Apex’s favor, aside from its rates, was the privacy it afforded. I always signed the guest register as “Picasso Triggerfish” (the English name of the neon rainbow-hued fish the Hawaiian’s call “humuhumunukunukuapua-a”), and declared my place of residence as “Victoria, BC” (I guess I was Victoria’s secret). When friends would come to the Apex looking for me, the owners would claim, “No such person here.” A war protester and outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy, I enjoyed a certain sense of security (as secure as one could feel sleeping on beds that creaked all night like Frankenstein’s shoes) to think that even the FBI probably couldn’t find me at the Apex Hotel.

In those days, the P-I newsroom was as divided as the nation itself. An uneasy truce existed between the old guard of Hearst hirelings and the mostly younger employees who marched to different, more progressive drummers. The latter were tolerated only because we did good work. Weekly prizes were awarded for the best headlines, prizes which Darrell Bob Houston (an unruly genius Blue Moon denizen and Tarzan lookalike) and I won so consistently that other copy editors were inclined to just stop trying. The parent Hearst Corporation frequently praised the P-I ’s headlines, which kept the bosses content. Our work, moreover, seemed to suffer not at all when on slow nights between editions Darrell Bob, a couple of others, and I would sneak up on the roof to smoke a joint.

One night, however, a coworker brought in some blond Lebanese hashish, just off the boat, which we felt compelled to go up and sample. Back at the desk, I recall staring at the copy in front of me for an inordinately long time, as if it were the footprint of some alien life-form that I was ill equipped to identify. I don’t believe I won any prizes that night.

Which reminds me, I’m always astonished when readers suggest that I must write my novels while high on pot or (God forbid!) LSD. Apparently, there are people who confuse the powers of imagination with the effects of intoxication. Not one word of my oeuvre, not one, has been written while in an artificially altered state. Unlike many authors, I don’t even drink coffee when I write. No coffee, no cola, no cigarettes. There was a time when I smoked big Havana cigars while writing, not for the nicotine (I didn’t inhale) but as an anchor, something to hold on to, I told myself, to keep from falling over the edge of the earth. Eventually, I began to wonder what it would be like to take that fall. So one day I threw out the cigars and just let go. Falling, I must say, has been exhilarating — though I may change my mind when I hit bottom.

Indicative of the cultural schism at the newspaper was the response to the death of Jimi Hendrix. When the report of the rocker’s untimely demise came over the Associated Press wire, our news editor snarled, “Who cares?” He wadded up the copy and tossed it in a trash can. Incredulous, I retrieved it and carried it into the managing editor’s office, explaining that Hendrix was not only an international star, he was a Seattle homeboy. The story ran in a prominent spot.

The P-I ’s managing editor (he happened, luckily for me, to be Louis R. Guzzo, my former boss in the arts and entertainment department at the Times ) was adept at keeping peace between the factions. I’d had an artist friend make me a mouse mask: not just any mouse, not that twit Mickey, but one of the long-nosed secret-agent mice featured in the Mad Magazine strip “Spy vs. Spy.” One evening I wore the mask to work. As I sat at the copy desk, doing my job, the radically stylized rodent nose protruding a good twenty inches from my face, an undercurrent of murmuring coursed through the newsroom. At one point, the managing editor passed by and, inescapably, noticed my paper proboscis. Guzzo stopped in his tracks. He just stood there staring at me, his hands on his hips. A hush fell over the room. All typing ceased. My cohorts were fearing for my job, my detractors were hoping I’d be summarily sacked. After a long pause, the boss said, “Robbins, you’ve never looked better.” He walked away. And that was that.

A month later, however, I was sent back to the Apex to change when I showed up for work in a gorilla suit.

It was at the P-I copy desk that I received the phone call from Luther Nichols telling me Doubleday had accepted Another Roadside Attraction for publication. This was around the middle of 1970. I’d finished the novel all ashiver one frigid midnight (we’d run out of heating oil) that January, and over the next six weeks or so slowly retyped the handwritten manuscript on my rackety little Olivetti portable, then paid a professional typist to render an even cleaner copy. This I’d mailed to dear Mr. Nichols, who forwarded it to New York, where, at Doubleday headquarters it was once again the subject of considerable debate. This time the younger editors prevailed.

Subsequently, a contract arrived, offering me an advance of $2,500, modest even for the time, along with a basement-level royalty percentage, standard for a first-time novelist lacking an agent to negotiate for him a sweeter deal. Not that I gave a large rat’s poot, understand. My motives for writing fiction — which, of course, date back to early childhood — have always been kindled by a runaway imagination and a love of words, rather than any banal craving for fortune or fame. Believe me, I take no credit for that attitude, and would never attempt to attribute it to strong moral principles. Fate just happened to have wired me that way.

A hardcover edition of Another Roadside Attraction was published (“printed” may be a more accurate term) in 1971. Only six thousand copies were run off and there was little in the way of promotion: no signings, book tours, interviews, or public readings. (I just felt grateful there wasn’t a public hanging.) Despite acclaim from authors as diverse as Graham Greene and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the critical establishment either dismissed the book curtly or ignored it altogether. Its first published critique appeared in Kirkus Reviews, in whose pages some sage declared that ARA wasn’t a novel at all but, rather, a lot of record album titles strung together as prose. Is it churlish of me to smirk ever so slightly when I point out that forty-three years later, the book is still in print, continuing to sell?