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

During my ninth year, when I was in the fourth grade, my father moved us temporarily to Burnsville, North Carolina, likewise a mountain town, though lacking Blowing Rock’s altitude, scenic vistas, and seasonal gentrification. Our rented home on the outskirts of Burnsville was adjacent to the grounds of a defunct boarding school. One morning I awoke to a clamor, and from my window observed a multitude of brightly painted trucks and silver trailers filling the weedy campus next door.

As men began to unload heavy rope, wooden poles, and giant rolls of canvas from flatbed lorries and panel vans, I remembered the posters I’d recently seen downtown and realized that a circus was setting up practically in my own backyard! Shaking with excitement, barely taking time to dress (was I wearing red and orange?), I raced out into the vortex of activity intent upon finding a job and seeing the show. I accomplished both, but more importantly, I encountered the flesh-bound instrument of secret wisdom and cosmic love torture who was to animate my fantasies and billow the embers of my yearning for the rest of my life.

Her name was Bobbi. She was eleven — an “older woman.” She had yellow hair that hung down to her waist and wore riding britches and black patent leather boots, the tops of which very nearly met the end of her tresses. And she had a snake: a pet blacksnake that she carried around the way an ordinary little girl might carry a doll. Bobbi’s right arm was tattooed with small scars, souvenirs of the many times the snake had bitten her. (It was an American racer, probably of the rather common Coluber constrictor subspecies, and obviously nonpoisonous.)

Bobbi was both the most exotic and romantic creature I’d ever met, a preadolescent living embodiment of Tarzan’s Jane; of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle; and though I had no clear notion of it then, of the feminine archetype to whom there clings an air of hidden knowledge, something strangely meaningful, equally nurturing and dangerous.

It was because of Bobbi that at a tender age I became a lifetime member of that exclusive order of men who believe a woman in pink circus tights holds all the secrets of the universe. She was not yet in tights but it was no great stretch to project for her a life in spotlights at the top of the tent, swinging by her hair; or else pirouetting atop the bare back of a prancing stallion in the center ring. As thousands cheered.

Bobbi was of the circus, born and bred. Her father was ringmaster and show manager; her mother — billed on sideshow banners as “the Indestructible Woman” — climbed twice daily, scantily clad, into a wooden coffinlike box through which about a dozen heavy swords one by one were driven. Bobbi — beautiful, fearless, ever dramatic — was a young goddess of the big top and I simply could not or cannot imagine an adulthood in which, as one of those so-called exotic dancers, she might hootchy her kootchy on a tawdry stage in the armless embrace of a burlesque boa constrictor.

Forget Toni and Nancy, forget Gwendolyn Berryman. Bobbi was on another plane entirely, and I was not so much in love as in awe. It was, of course, unrequited, although she, generally deprived of playmates, seemed fond enough of my company. When I wasn’t watering the llamas, shoveling monkey poop, or performing those other chores in the menagerie tent that was earning me a pass to the main show, Bobbi and I hung out on the lot; and when my duties were done, we’d walk the short distance to my house and play board games or improvise scenes with my toy train set. Out of deference to my mother, the blacksnake would be left behind in its cage.

On the second day (and I’m unsure quite how it transpired), Bobbi’s mom and dad came to lunch at our house. It must have seemed a bit surreal, the flamboyant ringmaster and the Indestructible Woman sitting at our dining room table eating soup and discussing the war (Pearl Harbor had been bombed six months earlier) with my parents. Nevertheless, lunch went well, so well in fact that Bobbi’s father (surely at his daughter’s instigation) invited me to go on the road with the show. And my parents said yes!

I didn’t go far. Only to the next stop, some fifty miles away. And after the performances there, after a couple of days of free cotton candy, curious conversations with clowns, and all the monkey manure I could muscle, Daddy drove over, picked me up, and took me home: Mother had been worrying. So much for “running away with the circus.”

No, I didn’t run away with it, but it might be fair to say that the circus ran away with me. As a teenager in Virginia, I performed sideshow and menagerie chores for Hunt Brothers, a show with more animals and a larger cast though, sadly, no Bobbi. (Except from afar or in my fantasies I would never see the likes of her again, although as an adult I made the mistake many times of projecting — unfairly — her image, her archetype, onto young women who, though lively and eccentric enough, were fundamentally unsuited for the role.) I also worked brief stints as ticket seller and concessionaire on the midways of a number of carnivals and fairs. The moment the first vehicles in a garish caravan began to roll into one of the small Southern towns where we lived, I would be bicycling to the setup lot, looking for a chance, as the showfolk would say, to be “with it,” wishing I might leave town in their company.

The attraction for me wasn’t so much the fierce individualism and freedom from convention afforded by the transient life — though the older I got the greater the appeal of the open road — but rather the sheer exuberant gilding-the-lily poetics of the baroque spectacles themselves, the invitation to bask in the rainbowed prisms of a movable Oz from behind whose spangled curtains genuine wizards seldom failed to emerge.

The circus provided a separate reality, with an emphasis, if truth be told, on reality . In the lyrics of a popular song, the term “Barnum & Bailey world” was coined as a synonym for all that is phony and false. Certainly, there was deception, bombast, and ballyhoo aplenty, and even outright grifting in some of the smaller shows, but ultimately the old-fashioned circus was real to a degree rarely approached by most modern entertainments, including “reality TV.” Those snarling tigers swiping at a trainer in the center ring were flesh and fang and claw, not some Pixar animation; those aerialists working without a net literally risked their lives at every breathtaking performance. Beauty, novelty, mirth, and danger mingled in real time, real space a few yards from one’s place in the stands; posing the question “Which is the true phony, Barnum & Bailey or the Hollywood blockbuster; the Great Wallendas (whose seven-person high-wire pyramid I witnessed shortly before their fatal fall in Detroit), or the preposterous heroics generated on some studio geek’s computer?”

Perpetually in 3-D, with no need for dorky glasses, a circus even stirred smell into the sensory mix: cardinal aromas of sweat, fear, sawdust, canvas, greasepaint, spun sugar, frying onions, and the steaming shit of various and sundry beasts of the world. And resting like a translucent — and perhaps transcendent — cherry atop the olfactory omnium-gatherum, the whole overflowing showtime sundae, was the pure aesthetics and philosophical eloquence — the poignant Zen — of the aerial masters.

When asked by a police magistrate why he famously and illegally walked a wire between the World Trade Center’s twin skyscrapers, Philippe Petit responded in a manner worthy of a Kyoto sensei: “I see three oranges, I have to juggle; I see two towers, I have to walk.” Karl Wallenda, when asked why he refused the protection of a net, replied, “God is my net.” And on another occasion, the Wallenda patriarch quietly declared, “On the wire is living. Everything else is only waiting.”