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

There had been a small but lively dinner party at the house in Charleston provided to Debra Winger and Timothy Hutton for the duration of the shoot. The house was in an upscale neighborhood a good distance from the downtown hotel where most of the cast and crew were lodged. At the end of the evening, I caught a ride back to the hotel with Neil Young and his manager. In the conversation that ensued, Neil learned for the first time that the guy in the backseat was a novelist. He’d never heard of me or my books, assuming all evening that I was an assistant producer or some other functionary connected to Lorimar Studios. He was mildly surprised, I suppose, but didn’t seem particularly impressed.

It was well past midnight and the hotel lobby was deserted. To retrieve our room keys, Neil and I approached the front desk more or less in tandem. When we got closer to the desk, the night clerk — a pretty woman in her early twenties — suddenly lit up like a ballpark, clutched her chest, and made an audible sound that resembled a mixture of a sigh, a squeal, and a purr. Naturally, Neil thought the excitement was for him.

“You’re Tom Robbins, aren’t you?!” the girl gushed. “I heard you were staying with us.” She went on to tell me how wonderful my books were, how much they meant to her, while the great Neil Young (and he truly is great) waited impatiently — invisibly — for his key. The human ego is a treacherous apparatus, best kept at a safe distance from the self, but I confess I took a small measure of pleasure in making a star play the transparent ghost for a change.

Prior to the publication of Still Life With Woodpecker, I had trouble referring to myself as a “novelist” without feeling like a fraud, an attitude engendered less by modesty or insecurity than a respect for the profession, for the craft, for language itself, a reverence that in today’s world may have gone the way of the “vine-ripened” tomato. But, when in 1980 Bantam Books, after paying me a substantial advance, brought out Woodpecker as its very first hardcover publication; and when the large-format trade paper edition — issued simultaneously — shot to number one on the New York Times bestseller list and I found myself on one of those coast-to-coast book tours, violating flyleaves with my nasty scrawl and fielding questions from the press, well, I could at last look in a mirror and believe that a genuine, full-fledged, full-time author might be staring back at me. It was cool, I can’t deny it, but I also possessed just enough good sense to remind myself that whom the gods would destroy they first make popular.

My initial personal buffeting by the gale of glory, the fickle gusts of literary fame, occurred in Austin, Texas. My appearance for a signing there attracted such an unexpected throng that the bookstore, to accommodate the crowd, set up my signing table in the beer garden next door, and I sat there, without once getting up to stretch or pee, and signed and signed and signed — for five whole hours. It was, as I said, a beer garden, and people were imbibing while they waited in line. Toward the end of the evening, many of those who approached my table, those who’d been far back in the line, were more than a little sloshed, a condition that inspired some interesting conversations. And behavior…

We were about four hours into the event when a young lady, emboldened by alcohol, and perhaps Woodpecker ’s audacious male protagonist (she’d been leafing through a copy of the book as she waited her turn), unbuttoned her blouse as she neared the table and requested that I autograph not only her book but her . Always willing, when possible, to accommodate a reader, and suspecting that John Hancock might well have preferred this opportunity to the Declaration of Independence, I brandished my Sharpie and in a jiggling jiffy my signature was emblazoned across two well-formed lumps of what — with the possible exception of mayonnaise and butterscotch cream pie — is the highest known usage of fat: a perfectly matched pair of baby snow pups, or what some of us are inclined to think of as “the twin moons of paradise.”

Well, this fair damsel proved to be a trendsetter. She was a student at the University of Texas, and we know how susceptible college kids are to fads. From that point on, at least four of every ten females in line bared her breasts when she reached the table, asking to be suitably inscribed. Ah, Texas! (A big back has a big front, in more ways than one.) At the conclusion of the event, one of the adorned girls was still hanging around the table, signaling with her eyes that she wished to take me home, perhaps to obtain my endorsement on other parts of her anatomy, but as drained by then as a hemophiliac on a blind date with a vampire, all I could manage was a weak wave as my handlers practically carried me to a waiting car.

On our way to the hotel, Bantam’s regional sales representative, smiling and shaking his head, drawled to no one in particular, “Man, we sure moved some product tonight.” That was, believe it or not, the first time that I ever entertained the notion that novels, especially my novels, could be categorized as “product.” Obviously, I knew that works of fiction were bought and sold, but like goods, like merchandise? The concept so jarred my sensibilities that it wiped much of the shine off the previous five hours, leading me to the unhappy realization, as I fell into bed, that to some people — people who worked for, say Playboy magazine or Hooters — even the “moons of paradise” might be considered “product.”

Terry Bromberg, the Bantam publicist who accompanied me on the Woodpecker tour, shared my enthusiasm for culinary exploration. In every city we visited, we made it a point to sample the local specialties. In Austin, we’d relished a fine, authentic Mexican breakfast late on the morning after the marathon signing, and we were walking back to the hotel to check out when it occurred to us that we’d failed, so far, to experience the pecan pie for which that region of Texas is somewhat renowned. We consulted our watches. It was very nearly noon, our flight didn’t depart until two, and we were already packed. Impulsively, we ducked into a downtown restaurant intent on crossing pecan pie off our “to eat” list.

Spacious, almost cavernous, the restaurant was just starting to fill up with the lunch crowd; lawyers, retailers, businessmen, trickling in a few at a time. A waitress took our order almost immediately, and as we sat awaiting our slices of pie, a different waitress waved to us from the far end of the large room. She left her station and rushed over to our table, where, smiling ever so sweetly, she undid the top buttons of her brown, dotted swiss uniform, and after apologizing, “It got wore off a little during the night, but you can still read it,” revealed to me, Terry, nearby diners, and God himself, my name — slightly smeared but readable as advertised — across her bare and Texas-proud mammaries.

After that, the pecan pie, while delicious, was kind of an anticlimax. And Terry and I left Texas agreeing that the Beach Boys may have been misled in wishing they all could be “California girls.”

Two nights later, my “product” and I again attracted an overflow crowd. This event was in Los Angeles at Papa Bach’s, a popular independent bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard, and there actually were searchlights. That’s right: searchlights for a book signing. And a line that stretched all the way around the block. The aisles in Papa Bach’s were quite narrow, so once more my signing table was set up outdoors, this time in an alley, more appropriate than they could have known for someone who once lectured on “alley culture.” A flatbed truck was parked a few yards behind me, and atop it a country-rock band was playing. Did I mention that this signing was in L.A.?